.
Did you watch the speech?
Of course, you watched the speech.
I feel so determined, so full of steel in the spine, so confident that we can make it through this dire time without having it turn into an even more dire time. I know now why so many people revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I felt this way – a little this way – once before, when Bill Clinton was elected President. That night in 1992, I was invited by a small, low-powered TV station to be one of their commentators on the local elections. Inevitably, the question of Clinton’s election came up. I remember that I said that Clinton was a man with greatness in him. I predicted he would accomplish great things. But I also said that he had great weaknesses, and that it remained to be seen which would dominate his Presidency.
I was really sorry to be right in that prediction. I wanted him to succeed so badly. And he did accomplish some great things. He brought us out of the budget mess we were in and he made us face up to the need to reform the welfare system. He took us boldly into the global economy. But he also brought us more deregulation – and Monica.
But Obama.
It’s not that I think he is the Messiah, as the Republicans would have you believe. I don’t. He will make mistakes. He has already made some. Not everything he proposes will work, but at least he will try.
But most important, he makes me believe in myself again. He makes me believe that the American spirit is different. We can find a way to better ourselves as a nation. We can hold fast to stern principles in the face of adversity. We can do whatever we really set our minds to.
And I think he will help us set our minds to solving this problem, to great things.
I feel hopeful again.
.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Kindergarten
.
One day, when my son was in kindergarten, I picked him up after school and asked, as every Mother asks, “How was school?” He responded, as almost every child responds, “OK.”
Trying to get a little more information, I asked him “Well, how was reading?” This response gave me a great deal more information than he intended:
“Lonely.”
“Lonely?” I asked. “How so?”
“Well, I’m the only one in my reading group,” he said.
This should not have surprised me, because J.R. had started teaching himself how to read at the age of three and by five was reading at a fourth-grade level. But reading wasn’t everything, and I didn’t like the idea that J.R. was isolated from the other children. So I went into school with him next day and told the teacher that it was not my goal that he be reading at a fifth-grade level when he left kindergarten, and that I was far more concerned about his social skills. Could she move him down into the next-highest reading group?
I thought she was going to kiss me.
This was a private school, you see, and most of the parents were shelling out the money for the classes in order to make sure that Dick and Jane got into a good prep school and a better college. That afternoon, when I asked J.R. about school, he said that he was in a new reading group and had a new book to read.
“It’s just a nonsense book, Mom,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s about rhyming and stuff.”
I don’t know how well my ploy worked, because J.R. struggled with social skills all through his school life and on into his adulthood. He was an only child, and he spent too much time reading and watching educational programs on TV. But I often think of that day, and I wonder how other parents and other teachers would have handled the problem.
We ask a lot of our teachers, and it looks like we’re going to be asking even more of them in the future. We expect them to keep our children in line, help them learn basic skills like organization and tidiness, on top of teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. Sometimes, they are challenged to teach precepts like “Honesty is the best policy,” and “First come, first served.” Certainly when they accidentally teach the opposite, we come down on them like a load of bricks. No one wants their child taught “Me first – I’m the teacher’s pet.”
But now we are adding to a teacher’s plate items like financial literacy and parenting skills. When I hear of an attempt to insert “life skills” into the curriculum, I often think of a very fine book and movie called “To Sir, With Love.” The movie starred Sidney Poitier and came out in the late 60s. It told the story of a British engineer temporarily out of a job who took on a class of teenagers for a term and decided to teach them how to get along in life instead of boring them with academics.
The math he taught them involved making a budget and taking advantage of bargains; the reading was where to learn about the safety and value of products; the writing was filling out a job application and writing a resume. He also taught them how to take care of a baby, how to make decisions about big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and cars, and when to challenge the precepts on which they had been raised. Towards the end of the story, a close relative of the only minority student in class dies, and the teacher makes them understand that they should not be intimidated by “what people would think” into staying away from the funeral just because the boy and his relative are black.
This is a heart-warming story, and I recommend you find the book or the movie, but I found myself wondering if that approach would have worked with a class of college-bound students. The British school system ruthlessly categorizes its students almost from the day of their enrollment. The children of lower-class parents are pushed into classes that stress the practical and end at the age of 15, while the children of upper-class parents are aimed towards high school and college.
We say we don’t do that in this country, but looking at the results from inner-city school districts vs suburban school districts, it is hard to deny it. Where you are born has far more to do with your chance at success in life than almost any other factor. If you were born in Harlem, it will be a long, hard slog out of the mud; if you were born in Westchester, you have to work hard to fail. This is something I would like to change, but I have no idea how to make it happen.
Certainly, the parents are not likely to achieve it. They are usually the product of the system that is not working for their children. That’s why we’re asking the schools to take on so much of their job. In some areas, there is a non-profit (usually church-led) after-school effort to help kids with their homework and keep them out of gangs. These programs fill a gap, but in two or three hours a day they can hardly plug it.
No, time and again, we are forced back to the schools, the one place we KNOW students spend multiple hours each day. And we are forced to the conclusion that we must start younger than we are starting now, that actual damage may not be done but nothing positive is being built, either, when a child has little or no age-level-appropriate stimulation in the home.
So why not supplement the home? The conservatives call this impulse the “nanny state.” I think we should revel in the term. What these children need is an old-fashioned British nanny – or an old-fashioned mother and father. I don’t know how to return us to the nuclear family, but I do know how to get children out of the hands of mothers who don’t really want them and aren’t doing them any good.
I’m not suggesting that the state take full custody of these children – just that the state make sure they are receiving the intellectual care they need at a young age. Then the child is “given back” at the end of the day. If a mother wants to fight the system, she can – by proving that she does what’s needed at home. But if she can’t prove it, the child should go to the school during the day, where he or she learns to be one of a crowd, part of a team, citizen of a nation.
It would require a major investment – in appropriate classrooms, equipment, and teachers – but it would be a boon to the economy. All those young mothers freed to work at a job while the child is in school would mean a great deal of tax money coming into our government coffers – probably almost enough to pay for the program. In addition, we could have a means-tested scale of contributions paid by the mothers and fathers whose children were in the program.
If they were not employed, they would have no excuses for not looking for a job. If they were unemployable or if they wanted to rise, there would be no bar to them going to classes at technical institutes or community colleges. We ought to see a decrease in the number of child abuse cases as the parents have time to themselves to get themselves in order and on a track to success. Public service advertising could make all this seem “cool.”
In other words, giving the babies, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten children access to the stimulation and care they need might, just might, give the mothers and fathers what they need to build a better world.
And maybe more parents and teachers would be faced with kindergarteners who already know how to read.
.
One day, when my son was in kindergarten, I picked him up after school and asked, as every Mother asks, “How was school?” He responded, as almost every child responds, “OK.”
Trying to get a little more information, I asked him “Well, how was reading?” This response gave me a great deal more information than he intended:
“Lonely.”
“Lonely?” I asked. “How so?”
“Well, I’m the only one in my reading group,” he said.
This should not have surprised me, because J.R. had started teaching himself how to read at the age of three and by five was reading at a fourth-grade level. But reading wasn’t everything, and I didn’t like the idea that J.R. was isolated from the other children. So I went into school with him next day and told the teacher that it was not my goal that he be reading at a fifth-grade level when he left kindergarten, and that I was far more concerned about his social skills. Could she move him down into the next-highest reading group?
I thought she was going to kiss me.
This was a private school, you see, and most of the parents were shelling out the money for the classes in order to make sure that Dick and Jane got into a good prep school and a better college. That afternoon, when I asked J.R. about school, he said that he was in a new reading group and had a new book to read.
“It’s just a nonsense book, Mom,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s about rhyming and stuff.”
I don’t know how well my ploy worked, because J.R. struggled with social skills all through his school life and on into his adulthood. He was an only child, and he spent too much time reading and watching educational programs on TV. But I often think of that day, and I wonder how other parents and other teachers would have handled the problem.
We ask a lot of our teachers, and it looks like we’re going to be asking even more of them in the future. We expect them to keep our children in line, help them learn basic skills like organization and tidiness, on top of teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. Sometimes, they are challenged to teach precepts like “Honesty is the best policy,” and “First come, first served.” Certainly when they accidentally teach the opposite, we come down on them like a load of bricks. No one wants their child taught “Me first – I’m the teacher’s pet.”
But now we are adding to a teacher’s plate items like financial literacy and parenting skills. When I hear of an attempt to insert “life skills” into the curriculum, I often think of a very fine book and movie called “To Sir, With Love.” The movie starred Sidney Poitier and came out in the late 60s. It told the story of a British engineer temporarily out of a job who took on a class of teenagers for a term and decided to teach them how to get along in life instead of boring them with academics.
The math he taught them involved making a budget and taking advantage of bargains; the reading was where to learn about the safety and value of products; the writing was filling out a job application and writing a resume. He also taught them how to take care of a baby, how to make decisions about big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and cars, and when to challenge the precepts on which they had been raised. Towards the end of the story, a close relative of the only minority student in class dies, and the teacher makes them understand that they should not be intimidated by “what people would think” into staying away from the funeral just because the boy and his relative are black.
This is a heart-warming story, and I recommend you find the book or the movie, but I found myself wondering if that approach would have worked with a class of college-bound students. The British school system ruthlessly categorizes its students almost from the day of their enrollment. The children of lower-class parents are pushed into classes that stress the practical and end at the age of 15, while the children of upper-class parents are aimed towards high school and college.
We say we don’t do that in this country, but looking at the results from inner-city school districts vs suburban school districts, it is hard to deny it. Where you are born has far more to do with your chance at success in life than almost any other factor. If you were born in Harlem, it will be a long, hard slog out of the mud; if you were born in Westchester, you have to work hard to fail. This is something I would like to change, but I have no idea how to make it happen.
Certainly, the parents are not likely to achieve it. They are usually the product of the system that is not working for their children. That’s why we’re asking the schools to take on so much of their job. In some areas, there is a non-profit (usually church-led) after-school effort to help kids with their homework and keep them out of gangs. These programs fill a gap, but in two or three hours a day they can hardly plug it.
No, time and again, we are forced back to the schools, the one place we KNOW students spend multiple hours each day. And we are forced to the conclusion that we must start younger than we are starting now, that actual damage may not be done but nothing positive is being built, either, when a child has little or no age-level-appropriate stimulation in the home.
So why not supplement the home? The conservatives call this impulse the “nanny state.” I think we should revel in the term. What these children need is an old-fashioned British nanny – or an old-fashioned mother and father. I don’t know how to return us to the nuclear family, but I do know how to get children out of the hands of mothers who don’t really want them and aren’t doing them any good.
I’m not suggesting that the state take full custody of these children – just that the state make sure they are receiving the intellectual care they need at a young age. Then the child is “given back” at the end of the day. If a mother wants to fight the system, she can – by proving that she does what’s needed at home. But if she can’t prove it, the child should go to the school during the day, where he or she learns to be one of a crowd, part of a team, citizen of a nation.
It would require a major investment – in appropriate classrooms, equipment, and teachers – but it would be a boon to the economy. All those young mothers freed to work at a job while the child is in school would mean a great deal of tax money coming into our government coffers – probably almost enough to pay for the program. In addition, we could have a means-tested scale of contributions paid by the mothers and fathers whose children were in the program.
If they were not employed, they would have no excuses for not looking for a job. If they were unemployable or if they wanted to rise, there would be no bar to them going to classes at technical institutes or community colleges. We ought to see a decrease in the number of child abuse cases as the parents have time to themselves to get themselves in order and on a track to success. Public service advertising could make all this seem “cool.”
In other words, giving the babies, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten children access to the stimulation and care they need might, just might, give the mothers and fathers what they need to build a better world.
And maybe more parents and teachers would be faced with kindergarteners who already know how to read.
.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Taxes?
.
What is it about taxes and the American public?
Timothy Geithner and his accountant misinterpret the tax code, are notified of their mistake, and Mr. Geithner pays his taxes and penalties in full, yet some think this disqualifies him for the post of Secretary of the Treasury.
Nancy Killefer flubs the tax payments she should have made in regards to her household help, and withdraws her name from consideration to be Chief Performance Officer.
Then we have the case of Tom Daschle.
I didn’t have much detail, so I did some googling and found out that his sins were a little worse than either Geithner’s or Killefer’s. Not only did Daschle fail to pay tax on the use of the car – something I would consider an innocent mistake – he also failed to report income from consulting. His excuse that the company who paid him sent him an incorrect 1099 doesn’t hold water. I was a consultant once, and I knew what companies had paid me at the end of the year. If my numbers didn’t match the 1099, I looked into it, notified the company it was incorrect and got a corrected one – and I didn’t have an accountant.
As for Killefer, I have had household help and also business employees, and I can tell you that the information provided by the government to help you properly deduct taxes and deposit them with the government is pretty impenetrable. I could not afford an accountant, but I finally hired a service to do my payroll in my business – and I had only three employees!
But what does any of this have to do with whether these people were good choices for the jobs they were being considered for? I don’t have any qualms about their ethics – well, a little about Daschle’s (or at least Daschle’s accountant’s) – just because they ran afoul of the IRS (or the Washington, DC, government in Killefer’s case). My husband and I have made errors on our income taxes that have been caught at least twice. Once, we got a refund. The other time, an insignificant error had ballooned into a significant amount because it took the IRS 18 months to notify us of the error. That 1½% per month really adds up fast.
There’s just something about tax problems in the mind of the American public. For example, my father, probably the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican you’d ever meet, didn’t give up on Richard Nixon until he found out that Nixon had cheated on his taxes. A covert, political burglary, thousands of dollars in hush money, stonewalling the Congressional committee, money laundering, subversions of the Constitution – those didn’t concern him. But if a man cheated on his taxes, then he was a lowdown, Commie, unpatriotic, un-American no-good-nik.
The loss of Daschle – who now cannot serve the administration in any way – is huge. It’s hard for people not in politics to understand how important it is to have someone on your side whose calls will be taken. You see, you can’t persuade someone to your point of view or get their insight on a problem if they’re “in a meeting” every time you call. People take the President’s call, of course, but he can’t make all the calls we’ll need as we run these economic rapids.
Tom Daschle probably calls heads of state on a regular basis, even in his role as a private citizen. I’m sure there are other people who have an equally thick rol-o-dex, but Obama needs every one of them he can find and persuading them to leave uber-lucrative private life for uber-unprivate public service isn’t easy. But he’ll find some.
Let’s just hope they and their accountants have never made any mistakes on their taxes.
.
What is it about taxes and the American public?
Timothy Geithner and his accountant misinterpret the tax code, are notified of their mistake, and Mr. Geithner pays his taxes and penalties in full, yet some think this disqualifies him for the post of Secretary of the Treasury.
Nancy Killefer flubs the tax payments she should have made in regards to her household help, and withdraws her name from consideration to be Chief Performance Officer.
Then we have the case of Tom Daschle.
I didn’t have much detail, so I did some googling and found out that his sins were a little worse than either Geithner’s or Killefer’s. Not only did Daschle fail to pay tax on the use of the car – something I would consider an innocent mistake – he also failed to report income from consulting. His excuse that the company who paid him sent him an incorrect 1099 doesn’t hold water. I was a consultant once, and I knew what companies had paid me at the end of the year. If my numbers didn’t match the 1099, I looked into it, notified the company it was incorrect and got a corrected one – and I didn’t have an accountant.
As for Killefer, I have had household help and also business employees, and I can tell you that the information provided by the government to help you properly deduct taxes and deposit them with the government is pretty impenetrable. I could not afford an accountant, but I finally hired a service to do my payroll in my business – and I had only three employees!
But what does any of this have to do with whether these people were good choices for the jobs they were being considered for? I don’t have any qualms about their ethics – well, a little about Daschle’s (or at least Daschle’s accountant’s) – just because they ran afoul of the IRS (or the Washington, DC, government in Killefer’s case). My husband and I have made errors on our income taxes that have been caught at least twice. Once, we got a refund. The other time, an insignificant error had ballooned into a significant amount because it took the IRS 18 months to notify us of the error. That 1½% per month really adds up fast.
There’s just something about tax problems in the mind of the American public. For example, my father, probably the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican you’d ever meet, didn’t give up on Richard Nixon until he found out that Nixon had cheated on his taxes. A covert, political burglary, thousands of dollars in hush money, stonewalling the Congressional committee, money laundering, subversions of the Constitution – those didn’t concern him. But if a man cheated on his taxes, then he was a lowdown, Commie, unpatriotic, un-American no-good-nik.
The loss of Daschle – who now cannot serve the administration in any way – is huge. It’s hard for people not in politics to understand how important it is to have someone on your side whose calls will be taken. You see, you can’t persuade someone to your point of view or get their insight on a problem if they’re “in a meeting” every time you call. People take the President’s call, of course, but he can’t make all the calls we’ll need as we run these economic rapids.
Tom Daschle probably calls heads of state on a regular basis, even in his role as a private citizen. I’m sure there are other people who have an equally thick rol-o-dex, but Obama needs every one of them he can find and persuading them to leave uber-lucrative private life for uber-unprivate public service isn’t easy. But he’ll find some.
Let’s just hope they and their accountants have never made any mistakes on their taxes.
.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Trees in the Lake
.
Every week as I drive to and from Topeka, I pass a lake, a man-made lake. I know it is man-made, because sticking up out of the water are the skeletons of trees. Each time I see them, I wonder at the tenacity that keeps them upright. Their black arms and fingers stretch to the sky, but under the water there must be stubborn roots holding them straight. Why didn’t someone cut them down before damming up the river?
Too often, we come up with solutions in society that are like that lake. We flood the area with good intentions, but we fail to cut into the source of the problem and so it never goes away. One problem like that is fatherhood.
Recent studies have shown that seven in ten men who are incarcerated were the product of a family without a father. Think of that: seven in ten. More than half. Nearly three-quarters. I find that mind-boggling. We have known for a long time that children raised by single mothers have more trouble in school, are more likely to be juvenile offenders, and too often wind up in gangs. Until recently, those children have mostly been boys, but we are starting to see girl gangs now.
This flocking together is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the initiations required are often violent and the gang members carry guns. A myriad of programs have tried to address the problem. Some believe in after-school centers where children can receive homework help or engage in sports in a secure environment. Some believe in midnight basketball to keep youths off the streets. Others support education, believing that classes in life skills will lead to better citizens.
The damage that leads to a life of crime is not done in the teenage years, however. It is done in earliest childhood, the time when children absorb the rules of life by watching the adults around them. If those adults are mostly immature teenage girls, the rules absorbed are not likely to be the ones we would wish for. Even if those adults do occasionally include the child’s father, that father is likely to be a teenage boy, and the child probably soaks in behaviors that will not lead to success in life.
So when we have teenage boys impregnating teenage girls and those girls trying to raise the resulting baby by themselves or with minimal help from their parents, we have a recipe for children who will grow up to repeat the patterns of self-indulgence and lack of discipline they have observed. Cutting those children loose from the roots of their behavior is a lot harder than helping them develop better core behaviors to begin with.
I’m not saying that there should be no programs to keep teenagers from sinking into gang violence or just general delinquency. Those programs are important. I am saying, however, that teenagers would need those programs less if we spent some time and effort on them as children. But who should provide that time and effort?
The best solution is for the child’s father to do so, but too often the child’s father not only doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know that he is needed. Many times, he doesn’t know what it means to be a man himself, so how is he going to teach his child?
We have many educational and support programs to help young women be better mothers, but few to help young men be better fathers. Maybe it’s time we re-examined those priorities. But we should help the young men as well as the young women, not instead of the young women. Children need two parents to learn from.
And if all children have them, maybe we won’t see so many trees in the lake.
.
Every week as I drive to and from Topeka, I pass a lake, a man-made lake. I know it is man-made, because sticking up out of the water are the skeletons of trees. Each time I see them, I wonder at the tenacity that keeps them upright. Their black arms and fingers stretch to the sky, but under the water there must be stubborn roots holding them straight. Why didn’t someone cut them down before damming up the river?
Too often, we come up with solutions in society that are like that lake. We flood the area with good intentions, but we fail to cut into the source of the problem and so it never goes away. One problem like that is fatherhood.
Recent studies have shown that seven in ten men who are incarcerated were the product of a family without a father. Think of that: seven in ten. More than half. Nearly three-quarters. I find that mind-boggling. We have known for a long time that children raised by single mothers have more trouble in school, are more likely to be juvenile offenders, and too often wind up in gangs. Until recently, those children have mostly been boys, but we are starting to see girl gangs now.
This flocking together is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the initiations required are often violent and the gang members carry guns. A myriad of programs have tried to address the problem. Some believe in after-school centers where children can receive homework help or engage in sports in a secure environment. Some believe in midnight basketball to keep youths off the streets. Others support education, believing that classes in life skills will lead to better citizens.
The damage that leads to a life of crime is not done in the teenage years, however. It is done in earliest childhood, the time when children absorb the rules of life by watching the adults around them. If those adults are mostly immature teenage girls, the rules absorbed are not likely to be the ones we would wish for. Even if those adults do occasionally include the child’s father, that father is likely to be a teenage boy, and the child probably soaks in behaviors that will not lead to success in life.
So when we have teenage boys impregnating teenage girls and those girls trying to raise the resulting baby by themselves or with minimal help from their parents, we have a recipe for children who will grow up to repeat the patterns of self-indulgence and lack of discipline they have observed. Cutting those children loose from the roots of their behavior is a lot harder than helping them develop better core behaviors to begin with.
I’m not saying that there should be no programs to keep teenagers from sinking into gang violence or just general delinquency. Those programs are important. I am saying, however, that teenagers would need those programs less if we spent some time and effort on them as children. But who should provide that time and effort?
The best solution is for the child’s father to do so, but too often the child’s father not only doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know that he is needed. Many times, he doesn’t know what it means to be a man himself, so how is he going to teach his child?
We have many educational and support programs to help young women be better mothers, but few to help young men be better fathers. Maybe it’s time we re-examined those priorities. But we should help the young men as well as the young women, not instead of the young women. Children need two parents to learn from.
And if all children have them, maybe we won’t see so many trees in the lake.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)