Among the myriad of things I find deeply moving and difficult today, this first week living without my Mom (after living together 54 years)-is that the March on Washington is being celebrated.
She is missing the 50th anniversary.  She was anticipating it though.
I watched a program last night that she would have enjoyed. I want to ask my mother-where were you during that time (I think in Wisconsin where Dad was put through his PHD program from her effort). What was your perspective?
What did you think was going to happen?

I would know her then, I think,  to be expansive, young, trained in social work, interested in social movements to improve mental health, educate, working to open doors for people. To step forward together into an American dream. I was four in 1963 and took my cues from her, but I mostly recall her laughing, her industry. Mom was always cleaning, working, doing. Up, about, learning. I do not get to ask her more about the March on Washington, how she saw it, if she was first learning of Dr. King, because she's gone home. I do know she met Coretta Scott King several times and that she was very involved in social issues wherever she was.
(Actually she would have known a good bit having been stationed in Montgomery during the bus boycott years.) I'd just like to talk to her about her times and her perspectives. About anything really, I miss her terribly.

It's hard for me right now- and triply so- to find a way to write about teaching the March on Washington, how that has inspired in my career. I've engaged for many years in programming in schools around the Dream of MLK. It has been a common thread in every year of my instruction.
In one school-on a reservation but more or less run by local ranchers- a few years back- just the mention of King or civil rights was enough to assure you'd lose your job, in the 2000's!!! There in that San Diego setting, buried there, there will be no lessons on "the March" today.
Usually in tandem with school/community support, we have asked children to develop dreams, life goals, and worked with them to achieve academic success to assure their freedom and step toward that vision. King inspired us.
Only in the last five to ten years has that work entirely been re-defined in terms of test scores or money. Career ready. It might have always been the dynamics but now individual worth is so directly measured by the yardstick of the dollar-it is a different kind of teaching. Flipped I suppose.
Now we are not concerned with living a good life at all in rhetoric, or having love, happiness in that life. It is a transactional one-lost to varying techniques to pursue scores and ultimately ones money and leisure, to besting another, to the purchase.
I know the changes, and it's difficult to see the footage of another time, the time of the March, and reflect on how we got to here. King's leadership inspired. We deflated.
And we have entered the times of a foam finger and a girl grinding.
Where has the music gone?

It's hard to think of this, but what Mom's death crystallized for me was how truly awful it is we do not universally provide health care. Can't see children out of homelessness, stop the violence, and pull together. I somehow see the March anniversary as the call to remember WHY. The opportunity to examine race, bias, all of this boils down for me to something hard to do, that my mother did try to do-to see through another's perspectives. Can I be my enemy, understand and walk in his shoes?
It is not going to be delivered to children in an enforced CHAMPS program.
That seems to be insidiously insisted upon in a system that wounds too often and retaliates too much. And that ability to be open to the suffering, it is the work we need to do for our own sake. CHAMPS that.

Mom saw pretty positively, but she saw us in times growing that emphasize wealth, division, and , I think, a lack of compassion getting threaded into the dialogs. So that might be a wrong perception, or just a media driven reality. Or non reality. When after all the years of my service, my care for others teaching-she saw what was done to me at work-she said that she gave up hope. Especially in the betrayal of a friend. Because of the truth I sit silenced.
Mom would have looked at this celebration of the March as the thing I hope it isn't-a kind of once upon a time there was, the disconnect from where we are. Lost to time as she is now lost. But as we see schools dismantled, closed, public ed now facing testing schemes to fail at least two thirds of the nation's intelligent and able children, the rapid sweeping out of our teachers and their union, she was not blind to what has ultimately taken over. You are valued by your bank book.

Mom took out her "Pearl" account bankbook many times in the last few days. As she was dying. It held nothing at all but old stamps recording payments, but she wanted to have something to provide to me I think. It is a record of her mortgage up until she had to sell her house to survive, having sacrificed to care for her Mom- and my father-divorcing her earlier- with couple hundred to pay in child support-his unwillingness to give her the two hundred she begged for, she needed to keep her house. No retirement for her. Hers was a record of her value to today's world and my father. Nothing.

I see it in the dialogs that are not addressing homelessness, children as human beings living in this, in the endless drilling and testing instead of school. Sad to say, I don't think academic excellence is about an accountability scheme driven to pay text book corporations, led by billionaires, about what we see now. As our achievement gap deepens and our middle class fades, and our division is so severe-we are weakened. I don't think Common Core is an answer, not a vision,  nor do I think narrowing, drill for tests or the take over of schools by those that bought in-I don't see that as in line with the March. I know the schools needed to drive the social change we need to have. Gosh that kind of statement is a hotbed. But people need to progress with some shared experience of community.  They needed hope. And investment. Most are crumbling.
In the current way that played out, the reforms having failed the kids that were experiencing poverty, racism, violence, social issues from poverty-perhaps the issue is the reforms-who formed them, how they came to be, their underlying assumptions, political failure, so on. I think the March was about the development of large scale societal response to the injustices-and I think we fail beyond measure in things like NCLB precisely because of our unwillingness to truly commit and examine the issues. We are drowning in poor sexed popular culture, in greed, in unethical idiocy, argumentative back stabbing, in a lack of compassion and cooperation with a willingness to individually have less, to see our own faults,  to define this as a process or something my mother did do to some degree.
She didn't consume. Thought about what was happening especially in the poor. She did do that.

Ah well.
I'm struggling with terrible grief. I cannot write anymore and everything I say sticks like a gloppy, sticky uncooked, inedible rice. There is such a far way for people to go now to help children-I'm not sure if it can happen. Maybe. Maybe leaders will come. Maybe folks will ask themselves what purpose childhood serves. Value play. Value all of us as having shared purposes.

My mother would be watching the coverage of the March on Washington-I know that.
She would remember what once was. I think she was alive always in her times. Her head might have been in the sand about some personal issue-because it was painful to take on-but not really about the issues we face as a culture. She could process a different view, and she thought long and hard about helping one another-say in affordable health care or public schools. Up until the week she died she wouldn't even use her Medicare-saying she couldn't waste that money on herself.

One of the amazing things you do when someone dies is try to process your time with them-unfortunately in our world we think this is so private we might not even be doing it-while working and going on as if you were not somehow doing this. It's actually something we hide and discourage-open expressions of this loss, just like we scorn sickness-as if we've got no time in a modern world. I saw that in the hospital too, in the wearhousing of the elderly. Folks shut into retirement villages with family that now can fail to experience the wisdom in aging and the lessons of death. Hi, bye, I've got to go play golf to relax. We've consumed ideas that we aren't supposed to stop our life to care for our parents. We can't afford all of this-we have to keep running to keep our head afloat. And then we die.

You have to write the obituary.
Last night my husband wrote my mother's. It costs $17 dollars a column inch to put in our hometown paper, we wonder how many $ that'll be to express her life.  I'm not sure what it costs in my CA town. We will post it mostly because I'm adding a suggestion that she'd probably have liked if people gave some small amount to a charity in her name- My daughter wanted that info yesterday for her work to do. My daughter settled on something to serve Veterans. Mom was The Veteran's Outreach worker in Morgantown WV for a time. During that period I found our house populated with guys that took over the basement, garage, one legged house keepers, as I gave rides all over the county, and things that seemed like Mom-having nothing to give them from businesses having jobs at that time-and no money herself-so she gave them shelter, her few things, and tried to do for others.
So that is important for me to remember.

In her last three days she was very upset that we do not have ice machines at our public schools. I kind of answered truthfully to her inquiry- in that I bought my own chair- I have not had a lot more than an ice machine-ice machine way down the list. She simply said- "Why don't the rich buy a school an ice machine so children can enjoy a cool drink?"
I had no idea how to answer this.

No one cares?

This is what we will  post as an obituary for Mom. Mostly my husband wrote it.
After that I guess from time to time I'll remember her here, and she'll be a part of a piece as  I write-it's a long process, this grief. A long march.
She loved to look at the children's artwork here that I had them create.
But that was taken away. So, maybe it is best that my work with kids never be seen in any way.
It serves someone's purpose. And it hurt my mom.

Jean Frances Lucas McIntosh passed from the Earth on August 23, 2013 in Ventura, California. At her side, as always, was her daughter Sarah Elizabeth McIntosh Puglisi. She is survived by Sarah ( husband John D. Puglisi) and her son Kenneth Dale McIntosh Jr. and her brother Charles Lucas.  Jean was well loved and closely connected to both her children and her grandchildren Sylvia Mary Puglisi, Sophia Anne Puglisi, and Luca Vernon Puglisi. Jean was an important member of the Puglisi family and our community of friends and acquaintances. She will be greatly missed.

Jean was born on February 16, 1928 in Ashland, Virginia the son of Harry and Gladys Himmelwright Lucas. Jean was preceded in death by her brother Marshall Lucas and sisters Doris Flagg, and Sarah Slaughter. Though distance separated Jean from extended family and friends, she kept all in mind and heart on a daily basis and was an avid documenter of family trees and current events through her use of the Internet and surveys of many local and national online newspapers. Family, friends, and community were ever present in her mind and conversations.

Jean lived several lives in her eighty five years. As a young girl she lived in Ashland, Virginia and together as a family, they spent summers working at a family owned fruit stand on the boardwalk of Wildwood, New Jersey. Jean spoke fondly and often about these youthful times and the vitality and big band music of the era. She was a singer.
In her youth, Jean worked at a department store, as a phone operator, and later joined the Air Force in the weather service where she would meet her husband and father of her children, Kenneth Dale McIntosh, Ph.D. Together they left the Air Force to pursue higher education at the University of  Tennessee, then the University of Wisconsin at Madison and later at the University of West Virginia at Morgantown where they would settle, make their home. Jean was an active member of the Morgantown community, had many friends, and worked on a variety of civic issues. In Morgantown, Jean worked as Veteran’s outreach worker. She loved art, and took classes to complete several paintings. Faulkner was her favorite writer.

Jean pursued knowledge and education throughout her life and remained an avid reader and researcher. She earned degrees from Randolph Macon College, the University of Tennessee, and West Virginia University.

With the arrival of her first grandchild, Jean transitioned to her tireless role as grandmother and co-caretaker of three children in her new environs in the state of California. Jean embraced her role as grandmother and brought all her energy and care to providing for our young and developing family. Over time, Jean became grandma and the opportunity to watch her grandchildren grow, develop, eventually begin to make life paths of their own. Her grandchildren and her own children were the central focus of her life along with her tasty southern cooking, her love for the news, history, reading, birds, and current events. Jean was an intelligent and learned woman who cared deeply for justice in the world and for the civil rights of the less fortunate.

Jean Frances Lucas McIntosh had a way with words and a sharp intellect and wit that she maintained throughout her life. Her active care taking and housekeeping slowed only in the last few months of her life when her appreciation for life and simple things seemed to grow stronger and deeper with every day.  Grandma Jean is and will continue to be a rich part of the Puglisi family. She will be missed.  

Jean Frances Lucas McIntosh passed from this earth around 1:00pm on August 23, 2013.
Her daughter Sarah, my wife, was with her in the hospital. At her end time, she was surrounded, as usual, by our family and her grandchildren Sylvia, Sophia, and Luca. She had the opportunity to express her love for the people she lived with and for her son Kenny who lives a country apart in her hometown, Morgantown, West Virginia and they, in turn, expressed their love for her. This was not always easy for her in her life, nonetheless, she loved and was loved openly and unconditionally.
Jean shared many stories with me in the past few months. After years of self-regulation, she had started going to doctors and allowing us to attend to her health needs. She didn’t want to inconvenience her family. Though little time has passed since her passing, it is easy for me to see Jean through the arc of her life.
Jean was born February 16, 1928. She was a very intelligent and inquisitive person who was surprisingly adventurous. Jean was a singer, an activist, a researcher, and a pilot. She’s likely among a rare few women who learned to fly an airplane but never drove a car. She served in the air force among the first women to do so and she supported her family and community using her mind, energy, and her humor.
Jean was an excellent cook, experienced in southern cooking, but able to learn to cook new things driven by other’s tastes or recipes she found in cookbooks; the cookbooks she loved. Jean was a voracious reader and was reading Jacque Pepin’s biography as her last book. Jean cooked and cleaned and attended to our family’s needs in her own way. She lived with us since 1989 in concert with the arrival of our first daughter Sylvia.
Sylvia, Sophia, and Luca went to the school of grandma. They were raised by grandma and they are deeply connected to her. This was a gift to them and to her, particularly in our modern times when in many cases, extended families are de-emphasized and the nuclear family moves from here to there to pursue a living. Grandma moved with us, and today, in her absence, our house is very quiet. There is a silence; a missing piece. We will have to adjust, most of all Sarah.
Jean took care of Sarah, and Sarah, very early on due to life’s circumstances, took care of Jean and Jean’s mother as well. Soon, together, they took care of Jean’s grandchildren. Sarah and my children. We did it together, warts and all…no manual included…trials and tribulations, but always focused on life and family.
Jean told me she heard some songs being played in her mind, with a full orchestra, in the last few days of her life. Less than five feet tall and very fit in many ways, Jean was brave and tough. She had a big heart that finally gave out.
In the end, she allowed me to summon the best of what I could offer as a human being to another being; what my family raised me to be… she tested me in many ways. In the end, she gave me the opportunity to see the constancy and current that runs through mankind. This reminded me of what is important and most meaningful in life.  Words do not come that describe this that do not fall to cliché…but I have seen this in my wife, my children, my family when I lost each of my parents years ago. Compassion, separates us from beasts, said the poster my mother created and had hanging on her wall attributing the words to Gideon.  
Jean, like all of us, was many things. She had multiple identities, some changed over the years in different settings and for different people. These last six months, Jean let me into a vision of herself as she was years ago. World War II ended, and a beautiful, young, petit, adventurous girl found herself carried away by life’s tosses and turns. Many times, I think, like flying inside a washing machine, but other times, that she remembered fondly, as experiences that were as good as they get.
Jean was a simple woman with few needs. In the last few months, she enjoyed and appreciated the taste of food like no one I have ever seen. She watched the birds, she felt the sun on her skin, and she followed the news; the news of the world and the news of her family. I am grateful for what she offered our family and I miss her.
I am sure that she had the last word, the last laugh, and that she arranged her end time to our greatest possible convenience. Perhaps years of relationships and circumstances and the stuff of life arranged themselves to obscure the great value and worth she had, like every human being. I am glad that she lived and died with as much dignity and love as we could muster as a family. This is what every human deserves, but many are not afforded.

You may wonder where I have "been." Or you may not read my writing, and haven't seen a profound change. It's all good.
I have been in the last year or so, maybe longer really, in days where I pulled into myself to take on the end of the life of my mother.  It was my primary focus. And many things demanded - or I wanted- or needed-but, this was where I've been.

It required me to focus ONLY on that in some strange inexplicable way, on the emotional and personal plane, or as much as I could, and I do not mean in the sense of doing a ton for her-more it was the heaviness of accepting something I never wanted to come to be, of trying to just be here, now. To shed things. To bear it. I couldn't give the supports and writing and the openness to the world I love now at all.
I could not defend myself when I needed to at work or attend to that except in trying to be there for my job for the kids the best I could. I could not be in "the world" so much.
I was pulling into myself, and into my kids as I could, and just recalling the impossibly hard years as her mom lived vegetative-that would flash for me as maybe what was coming- as I worried I was going into that phase here with mom. I know the marathon that is- times and events when I was about 20 to 25-when I took kinda my life to face this other most incredible family woman's end of life.
Which was super hard. (And very crushing then in such poverty and lack of resources, mom lost her house to this and everything.)
Just learning, processing this time, and that time, and trying to hear Mom when she told me something- and because she was deaf too- then with others be her interpreter, interpret her,  and re-interpret to her. I annoyed Jack everytime my voice was so loud- I did that and I don't know why he didn't see that as my work-just what I was doing. She did want me sitting here. She did need to know I was right here-not because she'd ask for anything at all quite the opposite- but just to be with her. This is odd to read and maybe unnecessary to tell.

In five years I repeated at least ten times what I said to her-each and everything, so I felt I was always talking loud, and trying to say whatever it was another way, but she could depend on me mostly to make communication possible. I felt that was my role-a conduit- and answered thousands of questions she needed/loved to ask, and sat with her, and tried to have patience, calm, and when I inevitably epically failed- the sense to know that tomorrow was a new day. I needed to give support I'm sure to many, to write, send a gift, go see people, gosh tell you I am fading into this,  but I just needed to take care of Mom-or to try to.

August 23rd at around 1 PM in Community Memorial in Ventura, CA- room 420- my mother Jean Frances Lucas McIntosh had a massive coronary, took a bunch of increasingly deep and scary breaths and a huge lunging few and died. I was there, I put my hand and stopped the caring people there from all they do to shock and pump and machine a heart -  we had DNR (which you must understand is important to lessen suffering), and I put my hand between the compression they might have done (she was gone)  in deep calm and care and helped Mom to pass while watching this wonderful group of people care deeply and then she died.
I tried to say to them what you should- so they would not carry this as hard.  I have nothing but praise for the hospital during this time. She had a lovely roommate and I had the opportunity to meet her, her family, and to care for both ladies as I would want to be-and both helped me through this in different ways to understand WHAT Matters. I know I was there, and  it was a week with care and love.

Mom did not have pain, I suspect she wanted to save me from bringing her home-we were doing that right at that time- and her death was kind of a shock in the sense that she'd started recovery from infection, her lungs were better. But she struggled since March with pneumonia and it weakened her. While she'd lost some function mentally in most ways she was still herself. I am deeply thankful for that.

So, I wanted to share about my Mom. Lessons From Jean. Only a very few quick thoughts to help me pass this first night alone.

1) Do not waste.

I never saw my mom waste. Sophia likes to say she is a dumpster diver. She had a philosophy of saving- -we would save the earth that way.
I'm sure children of the depression grew up to understand this. I do not think I ever threw away something I didn't find later in the garage. In a tiny bag in the drawer, somewhere.  Or in her room. But the thing I take from that is this-it's lighter, it means less suffering, it helps us all to have enough.

2) Enjoy your food

Mom was tiny but all my family can tell you she loved her food. She loved the experience of having it. She loved avocados and shrimp, she loved taking time to eat. Cookbooks, recipes, sharing this way.  She was not a talker then-while eating. Mom  liked flavor.
She thought the hospital food this week was great.


3) Care for the children

And she cared about her grandkids and my class.
She didn't fully understand why many in my school life didn't see me as talented or insightful or caring of kids to actually teach them as she thought they might-but she tried very hard to see my life with the students and up until the deafness drown her hearing- she wanted to know about my classes. She cared deeply about them. She valued their learning. She felt that we give to the next generation.
She loved art-she wanted kids to have it.

4) Follow the news

I know she asked me today, what's going on in the news- and on the homefront news. I was able to make her laugh with a funny story she visualized about my son leaving the back door open two days ago and my discovering it, to try to send out my cat to being lost forever- and the cat told on him-he wasn't falling for THAT. She loved that. That he didn't run and he told. She followed every news event completely. Her room was lined, is lined, with her research into every conspiracy and thought ever of some awful  murder or event in justice of civil rights-except by and large I think she got it. I think she wasn't completely lost in her tracking and internal investigations.  She did not understand that there are many who do not know who Jacques Pepin is, or how the oil industry works, who don't care,  or few that have backlogs of literally hundred thousand resources on these things we know are there-collapse of economy, this, that. She did. She never lost that. She felt the news industry had gone to h but was the most important check and balance we have.


5) Ask questions

I never saw anyone ask as much. In her defense that style grew worse I think from strokes.
Her questions were tuned a bit to the side of needing to end with a little accusational looking question mark, like a new emoticon. Something a bit sharp and needly. Mom could sustain that tension. However I felt she was supposed to be a journalist.

6) Worry

Here I'm not going to say I think this is a lesson for all of us really. It is for me. Watching her with worry and anxiety I know what a cruel task master. I saw her struggle with that

7) Just don't smoke

8)  Above all else do not yield

9) This one my kid's helped me recall-keep trying to find the best fudge recipe

10) Enjoy the sun, a new experience, looking out a car window, someone new, your purse, getting attention, remembering, your friends, walking for sure, working, doing wash, cooking, bridge, your computer, TV, so many things.


There are others but I'm feeling like crying awhile.

It's a hard thing for me, the timing was just really amazingly weird. I would love her to be here-but she can't. Most all the other times in my life she was.

I loved my mom, the first lesson might be love family.

I read a great piece by a superintendent in New York on new "test scores" under Common Core exams. I've kept it to read just to myself when I do not see my district in CA, or anyone in the system,  writing anything like this to parents.
You see I'm rather fond of leadership.
Of their role in explaining and formulating.
So when I see it, especially after the past ten years,  I take note.

Here is her piece. (Any time I ask folks to link out I feel they don't. Then I wish I could copy/paste here for them-but my daughter tells me this is not OK. Well now the link isn't linking so I am going to copy it and apologize if I'm wrong.

Commentary on Math & ELA Results

Dr. Teresa Thayer Snyder

Over the past several months school leaders have been receiving countless messages from the State Education Department preparing us for the dire outcomes associated with the most recent spate of State testing in grades 3-8 in Math and English Language Arts.  As the date for the releases of the test scores approached, we received many notices of “talking points” to inform our communities about the outcomes, with explanations of new baselines and how these tests do not reflect the efforts of students and teachers this year.  I have rejected these missives because they reek of the self-serving mentality the ‘powers that be’ have thrust upon our students and parents.

Our community is sophisticated enough to recognize a canard when it experiences one.  These tests were intentionally designed to obtain precisely the outcomes that were rendered.  The rationale behind this is to demonstrate that our most successful students are not so much and our least successful students are dreadful.  If you look at the distribution of scores, you see exactly the same distances as any other test.  The only difference is that the distribution has been manipulated to be 30 to 40 percent lower for everybody.  This serves an enormously powerful purpose.  If you establish a baseline this low, the subsequent growth over the next few years will indicate that your plans for elevating the outcomes were necessary.  However, it must be recognized that the test developers control the scaled scores—indeed they have developed a draconian statistical formula that is elaborate, if indecipherable, to determine scaled scores.  I would bet my house on the fact that over the next few years, scores will “improve”—not necessarily student learning, but scores.  They must, because the State accepted millions and millions of dollars to increase student scores and increase graduation rates.  If scores do not improve from this baseline, then those ‘powers that be’ will have a lot of explaining to do to justify having accepted those millions.

If you examine the distribution of the scores, the one thing that leaps off the page is the distance between children in high poverty and children in relative wealth.  While all have been relegated to a point 30 to 40 percent lower than previously, the exact curve is absolutely connected to socioeconomic status—which has been historically true in such testing for more than a century.

The tragic part of this story is the collateral damage—the little children who worked so hard this year, who endured so many distressing hours of testing, who failed to reach proficiency, all because of the manipulation of the scaling.  We will be talking with parents whose children scored level four last year, who now may have scored a level two.  It does not mean much; it only means they are the unwitting part of a massive scheme to prove how these “high standards” are improving outcomes over time.  It is time to pay attention to the man behind the curtain—he is no wizard, but he is wily! 

By the way, if you want to know what curriculum experiences are being promoted for even our youngest learners by the ‘powers that be’, check out curriculum modules on www.engageny.org .  How many of us truly believe that expecting first graders to understand and explain why Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization is reasonable?  How many of us truly even imagine that six year olds should be able to identify cuneiform and hieroglyphics or understand the importance of the code of Hammurabi?  Check it out—then I suggest you let your legislators, and the Department of Education know what matters to you.

As we digest the information and prepare for the upcoming year, please rest assured that Voorheesville remains committed to challenging and cherishing our students.

What she is trying to do is explain something to families about why with the new Common Core tests every kid that looked like they were doing pretty well in an obviously good school, is now going to look like they are failures. As if in crappy schools. I'm shortening but that's the sub-text.
She credits folks with having "canard" in their repertoire, and an understanding of "a fix" in their cultural understandings. Maybe. Maybe not.
I count on neither in my world.

We have one more year before we get to fail the Common Core tests -as things stand.
A year to gain some broad or vague or whatever understandings of the thing and then gear up to teach to the new test. So we can go from everyone inadequate to mostly inadequate. Some want a wait period of a year or two-no one seems to be saying-we don't want this AT ALL. And I don't know why not.

What the public will derive from this, knowing that their children are basically good, is that the public schools are terrible, doing things even more crazy than ever, and then in a period of time we'll close public school, charter it at best, and hand over that which joined us together in common purpose-a strong public system we own- to that which your money can buy-which is now doing no better- but IS NOW run like a business.

And that makes me sad.

It's hard to participate, though I've been "told" "the arts are coming back."
I can't imagine the arts wanting to reappear in such a scenario, because their basis is essentially in conflict, but all hail the return of the arts in service of the test. Perhaps we can coax poetry to serve tests as well. Give this some meter.
Negotiate a deal with dance, music, with literature, so that we can "use" them to take the test.
Perhaps we can elevate something that was eliminated like libraries, by saying that they will help our testing. Maybe the library can be reclaimed as the testing center.

I find myself actually referencing my work by "the scores" now, as in the following I said to Anthony Cody recently, "We had a good year last year, I was doing more math, trying hard AND THE SCORES OVERALL AT MY GRADE LEVEL I THINK WERE UP."

Once I found myself saying this, I saw it for one of the gravest misrepresentations I ever gave-I was trying to relate we had worked hard and learned a great deal and yet my mouth SAID....
A long time ago I caught myself saying this, "He threw up repeatedly and had a hundred and two fever and needed to go home but luckily it wasn't ON the state test and he did finish the section." Of course that was several years ago. Before I was really blogging, and as I was being managed into the "sophisticated" school, district, state and national mentality that we are there to produce scores and do test prep.

This is not "informed by data" this is "exists for data."
And I doubt there are too many left that recall a time when data had just a place in the work.
As I do recall.

How would you explain to parents that a test is coming that makes two thirds of children in a high performing school look like failures, and so children in poverty schools likely will look like they didn't attend a school at all-all they did leveled to nothing?
What would your letter sent out to the community read like-would it be an honest and direct letter about the dismantling of public school?
Would you address the untried nature of Common Core?
Would you jump on board-excited and thrilled by the possibility?
Would you tell folks this is a "window of possibility?"

I don't see any possibility-we haven't addressed the issues that underlie the failure of those in need-the achievement gap- except by testing and insistence on teaching to tests. I fail to see that as particularly effective, data says we didn't do what NCLB stated.
Is Common Core rectifying the things in the appalling economic divide- other than through pressure on teachers through high stakes tests and all day long test prep?
What I saw last time around and started writing about was a very obvious lie. In NCLB it was stated to community that by 2014 all students would be proficient or advanced AND an achievement gap closed. I met no one that thought that could happen- in the funding lack and leadership vacuum in that law-no one had a handbook on how. No one however wrote that in letters home. Look folks-umm.

So I think it is interesting to read a Superintendent writing something to her families by way of preparation for the tanking that she's actually seeing having completed the tests-first round.

Should we address the politics?
Should we talk about the ramifications?
Should we look at the contexts?

What exactly will we "allow" teachers to say about all of this-in the last go round that amounted to telling families what standards their kids HAD to reach. Anything else you were breaking something that risked your job.

How exactly will educators conduct the dialogs of failure?

Today I went to the grocery stores.
Yes I go to two-one for organics, the other to pick up things I can't get at the organic one, the crazy things my Mom asked for-strange things-grampons (don't ASK), black olives, specifically Ajax, and today sardines. And, no, this isn't about that.
While I was traveling I listened to NPR News.
I need to find a way to normalize doing that when I'm NOT driving. Not driving I have no radio. This summer I drove under 50 miles, and set a record for not using any form of transportation but my legs. BUT I miss hearing the radio going to and from work. Not missing driving.
On NPR today was this piece on Voter Suppression in North Carolina.
Over time NPR has recorded pieces on voter suppression, doing it very well, and this was no exception. This is the link.
If you have not listened- it will be 8 minutes you will be glad to spend learning about HOW this will work, and who it affects. Effects. It will help you better consider the laws that were put in in NC, law put through responding apparently to record turn outs in the last general election in NC-not to ANY actual voter law breaking in elections.

My mother does not live in North Carolina. She couldn't get to a poll if we didn't take her now at 86. She's too fragile. She, like a person in the story, insists on voting ON the day of an election. Absentee ballots to her are a hot bed for very big electorial problems. She constantly questions what is going on at the poll, wants to see the ballot go in whatever box. She's demanding about it. Years ago my mother worked at polls. I remember her doing that for many elections. Her cryptic comment is, "If there is a way to cheat you out of your vote- they'll find it."
She doesn't specify who. She chuckles and says, "You figure it out."
One year, well later in  my time in WV-so around 1980- I remember driving a car full of older folks to polls.Some were people I knew well, some I made friends with through this. Mom got me into a basically all day long thing (many times after I drove), possibly for the League of Women Voters. I just recall it-I drove to wherever/whomever she directed. Listening to this report today I learned how and who will be kept from voting now in NC. It will not be the wealthy. It will not be the highly educated. It will not be those that have traditionally had the vote.

My mom does not have a photo ID. She has things like her birth record, social security card. But she did not learn to drive. She learned to fly a plane, and has her pilot's license. She has her military ID's. But, alas, no photo ID. And what to do to get one for some reason we didn't resolve the last time this started to really bother me.
I heard David Brooks tonight on PBS news blubbering on about how people just need to have photo ID but in the radio piece we learn that those without birth certificates CAN'T get them. Like the elderly woman born to a mid-wife in an old farmhouse. There are barriers but these folks have no reason I can think of to lose their right to vote.

 Mom, we thought, lost her purse in Carrow's before we discovered she hid it in my son's room. She had us search a good while before she revealed her secret hiding place. She gets confused. Since she insists every important record be in the purse I was facing trying to get the all of her ID again -realizing how easy it is to be a person with no papers- and as she is now she cannot visit offices and get everything again, she'd "play a trick" and say something making it even harder.
If we were adding in years of illiteracy and deep poverty to the mix-I cannot imagine.
"Just" showing a photo ID turns out to be a difficult thing. For some of us.

Also I listened hard to what a difficulty it is for those driving these folks to the polls, especially in rural areas. So that expanse of time prior to the election matters. Having a period of time to vote of days does help. I never realized how much until it was explained here. In West Virginia I recall how important all those volunteer drivers were. I know I drove a lot of people, never knowing HOW they voted,  and each one was so far out of their experience of normal it took time and care to do this-a very slow process. It was really something where I always thought-how do you make it day to day, even to the store. Like my own grandmother. I imagine my aunt probably took her to vote, and I'm sure many times to the store-but when I visited her in Florida I was astounded how hard it was for her to get her groceries. Much less to vote. How did she do it?
The elderly truly suffer these laws.

So I'm appalled by things that make it harder to vote or those that dismissively say, "How hard is it to just show an ID?" It's just so callous.
It's awful. 

The poor so poor they have nothing to give, the rich so rich they want nothing. It sticks in my head. But I think that quote applies. When did we get to the point where we did not have the compassion to care for seeing our citizens to the polls allowing them to exercise the most important right we have.

This summer, when I can - if Luca will watch Mom, I get out old watercolors and a pad to go paint.

When you go somewhere you enter into the work inside the setting's dynamics, which is extremely interesting-at times so calm-peaceful, or alternately active and de-focusing. Paining in the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden is amazing because of things like the redwoods. The squirrels that seemed bent on killing themselves defying gravity scared me when they came down a huge redwood headed my way beating each other to pieces at a breakneck speed-listening to the wood peckers and swatting the sweat bees-almost choking to death and asphyxiating on OFF-these are things I remember along with the music in the forest.
When I go to paint I understand immediately WHY the arts need to be included in the curriculum. It instantly proposes a problem-what goes in this picture-how do you take the all of it to represent the experience? So far I can only sustain a three hour work-but to get the watercolor to a really credible level I'd need 10. It's almost overwhelming technically, and then also work emotionally. When I'm in the forest all the details just flood in to confound my skill level further.
And skill is a barrier.
So is intention.
I'm learning and connecting to creating by doing, however. I need hundreds of these days to build enough real skill.

Today we tried the Ventura Harbor. I love painting water-I may have failed utterly, but the boats cannot be painted straight forwardly-I learned that. Well they can be painted, but you have to just represent the unbelievable amount of detail in some "suggestion" of it-rather like a poem, a short story-you are editing the experience, and as I was doing that I realized the importance of having children work in nature and how this translates to skills writer's can use.

It doesn't hurt that I'm also filling in a journal called 642, it's full of prompts and a few lines to complete the assignments. Again I think what to put in, what to take out. Am I speaking to emotions, or trying to represent this as it is seen by the eye(or in the case of writing- what happened).
In the journal I think-why am I bitching so much-is this a real issue I have?
Why do so many memories go to the hurt in life?
When I'm painting I'm utterly free of that.

Free.

Quite a summer.