What I've Learned This Week(ish)

1.  The definition of "neoliberalism" which I came across multiple times in this article, in the Utne Reader, an excerpt from a book about the historical context of organized labor and its relationship to today's working class and labor movements.  I find it fascinating how relatively meaningless the terms "liberal" and "conservative" really are in terms of any kind of coherent system of thought, making their social and political connotations really important to understand.  Neoliberalism, in terms of its emphasis on free markets and privatization, seems like it would be desirable to "conservatives," and yet I suppose it is the loss of jobs in the U.S. that makes conservatives and their (typical) strong sense of nationalism object to it policy-wise.  Hm.  Anyway, it's a good article and gave me a little hope.

Teachers are somewhat stuck between "labor" and white-collar professionals.  Because public school teachers are under-recognized, under-respected and under-compensated as a group (although the public is supportive of individual teachers), we really can't abandon whatever organized labor groups we can still get moving, and yet we want to be trusted, respected and compensated as professionals, and if we were truly considered a profession our issues would be more distanced from "labor" issues.  One thing (I think) that keeps teachers (and firefighters, police, etc.) in this in-between group is the idea that we are public servants. We are expected to have a certain degree of altruism about what we do (which makes me wonder-- do public defenders and prosecutors feel the same way?  I suppose, but lawyers have such a long-standing status as professionals...)  What gives firefighters and police a little more cache than teachers is that their lives are on the line each day, lending a sense of urgency and public obligation to their causes; also, sadly, I think that the fact that those careers are still more male-dominated and that teaching has been more and more feminized keeps teacher-groups from finding more political and professional footing.

2.  I took my kids and my mom kayaking when we were camping at Patagonia Lake with my sister and her family.  Mom was (as she put it) being a stick in the mud and almost wimped out, but we didn't take no for an answer.  Benchy told her that if she couldn't get out of the boat, they had a little crane lift down on the dock.  :)  It was a calm morning, sunny, with the puffing clouds we get during the day around monsoon season.  None of us had done it before, but I used to absolutely love canoeing in Girl Scouts, so I figured we'd be okay.  It was much easier that canoeing.  I now covet a kayak.

Mom

Mom and G

The Kiddos

3.  I visited our neighborhood carniceria for the first time.  For our 4th of July barbecue, we made carne asada and guacamole along with the typical (and fantastic) family potato salad (NO PICKLES), corn on the cob roasted on the grill and watermelon.  The carniceria was great.  My dad got hooked on it last summer, but I had never gone.  The man behind the counter helped me pick out which meat to use and how much to buy, and marinated it for me.  The meat counter was large and full.  The fresh chorizo looked very tempting.  The rest of the store was a wide selection of Mexican products and American snacks and drinks.  I will definitely go back.

4.  After a break of a couple of years, I took the kids and their cousin to BICAS to fix four flat tires, fix G's shifter which seemed broken, fix my basket and adjust my brakes.  I love that place, and I learned last week that they are truly kid-friendly.  The little girls were worried about getting their bikes down the steep ramp into the basement, and a volunteer came right out and helped them down (since I was holding my own bike).  My helper Isaiah patiently explained to me the basics of how the shifting systems on our bikes worked and how to adjust the shifting, and he scavenged for a new combined shifter/brake handle for G's bike and installed it himself (probably because he saw I was distracted by the kids.)  When the two little girls became bored, Colin gave them a spray bottle full of water and they found about 90 minutes of fun in that.  We were all very damp by the end of things.  The basement was cool, well-equipped and an artistic space.  We did all of the above plus installed two kickstands for $18 total, and when I tried to pay for neato artsy BICAS stickers for our bikes, they wouldn't take our money.  They said that since the kids were with me, the stickers were going to a good cause.  SWEET.  Love that place.

OK.  There's more to say, as always, but that is plenty enough for you to digest for one blog entry. 

City Lights, Bats, and Teacher Voice

I'm sitting on the balcony in the dusk watching the silhouettes of small bats flit through my line of sight to the valley of city lights brightening slowly below me.  The lights sprawl in fits and starts, hedged into irregular shapes by the foothills of the other three mountain ranges around town... the Rincons, Santa Ritas and Tucson Mountains.

Above me, dark wood beams neatly divide strips of night sky.  I should get to see some extra stars from up here tonight.  They appear one by one, teasingly.

I came out here, out of my Loew's Ventana Canyon room, to relax after a heady day of thinking about teacher voice and teacher leadership at the AZK12 Center's Teacher Leadership Institute.  I am observing things around me, trying to clear my mind.

It is day one of five days, and I'm finding it hard to encapsulate and process what is in my mind.  We viewed the film American Teacher and heard from one of the producers, Nineve Calegari, and one of the teachers profiled in the film.  We had breakout discussions defining teaching as a profession.  We were asked to define our own vision of teaching as a profession, and to make a plan as to how we would find our teacher voice and use our spheres of influence to make our voice heard and to affect policy.

[As I type, a small spider keeps dropping down in front of my screen.  I suppose it thinks my light will attract its dinner.  I keep having to flick it off of me.  Hopefully it doesn't have friends.]

At a dinner meeting, I encountered my new position as a blogger for Stories from School, which I will begin in August.  As I shared my idea for a juicy topic and heard what other bloggers were going to write about, and about some of the stories they had already shared, my amazement at this opportunity grew.  And the weight of the responsibility I feel to be both honest and yet professional... that weight also grew. The rhetorical situation of a teacher with both the best interest and privacy of students in mind, and the responsibility not to directly criticize or implicate individuals with whom I work, to make the stories specific, juicy, sincere, personal, and yet speak to broader issues-- this is a tricky rhetorical situation.  I want to take risks, provoke conversation, thought and change.  And yet I like my job and profession, and Tucson is a small town.

Right now my teacher voice wants to scream and cry, both in joy and frustration, for a thousand reasons.  I think I need to narrow my message.

[Also, I need to decide if I'm going to go home to turn off the coffee maker, or just assume it has an auto-off function.  I haven't used that one in so long that I truly cannot remember.  I'd rather stay here, in the balmy evening, with the almost cool breeze and the--WOW-- amazing full moon now rising over the Rincons to my left.  I hear breezes and no traffic... I can no longer see the bats... the stars are out... my spider friends have apparently given up...  I have some tough choices to make]