mala educación, primera parte

Right now, I don’t have the motivation to write much:

This article (I missed the New York Times Magazine a lot mientras estaba en Middlebury) is about the reconstruction of the New Orleans public school system after Katrina. Muy brevemente, algunas cosas se destacaron. First, the debate over the effectiveness of a revamping of the educational system to solve the problems of the children and families in this situation is strikingly similar to much of the discussions alrededor de Project HEALTH. The social and economic problems faced by our families are the root cause of their plight. Providing access to proper medical care, to welfare, helping them obtain food stamps does not address the fundamental problems of their situation. Provided that we help them conseguir trabajo—and wrangle some miraculous combination of FIP or SSI or food stamps that helps them survive, barely—usually the jobs entail jornadas larguísimas y muy duras. They work the undesirable jobs, the ones that wreck feet and twist backs and still fail to put enough food in the mouths of their children. But back to New Orleans and education. Here’s a cita del artículo:
“ ‘If we want to really get kids to the level that we want to get them,’ he said, ‘and we want to do it in a more efficient and effective way, then we would be well served if we took care of those kinds of problems — if we provided more resources to kids from conception to early childhood, if we took care of mental-health issues and physical ailments and teeth and eye examinations. Including, you know, where these kids go home to sleep at night. I’ve lived in this community a long time, and I can’t imagine how I could ever feel comfortable in neighborhoods that these kids live in at night. And yet they do, and we still expect them to do well.’
Pastorek paused for a moment. ‘So, now, can I solve all those problems tomorrow afternoon? Can I even get the attention of the people who have control over those things? Right now, in New Orleans, after Katrina, the answer is no, I can’t. But I can’t take the position that I can’t succeed unless I have those things. I have to take the position that we’re going to do it in spite of that. Now, will it be hard? Will I be less successful? Probably yes. But I have to take that approach, because I don’t have really any other cards to play.’ ”
There are so many interdependent elements necessary for el bienestar: education that widens job opportunities, your family’s socio-economic situation that is a crucial determining factor in the education you have access to, a secure living situation that contributes to academic success, so on and so forth. In the end, we’re all really working toward the same end, and la falta de aún un elemento is severely debilitating to the enterprise as a whole and in fact reduces the efficacy of the components are present (there are probably oodles of analogies from cellular biology that could apply here, but I don’t have my physio textbook with me, and my Google and Wikipedia searches are not helping me—sorry!) I think the result of this is that la pobreza nunca es eliminada, solamente evitada por el individuo, like Will Smith’s character in The Pursuit of Happyness. How do we take this into account—by we, I mean social workers, doctors, educators, all the people who work to try to mejorar the standard of living of this stratum of the población? We have our metrics of success; we need the individuals that are tangible evidence of the small successes que hemos logrado. Still, working on a case-by-case basis with the goal of succeeding with as many as we can all-too-often means that we work to find ways to cheat a broken system instead of coming up with solutions to fix it.

Coming up on next week’s episode of Inside Sophia’s Head…
“What first sold her on Miller-McCoy, she said, was when the woman who answered the phone at the school told her that the boys would wear matching blazers with the school crest. ‘I said, ‘Blazers?’ I’ve never seen any kids running around in blazers except at St. Augustine’ — a nearby Catholic high school — ‘and that’s where you pay to go to school. This is a public school, and they wear blazers and ties? I want that for my son. I do. I really want it for him. I know he can do it.’ ”

Middlebury: la última palabra

Qué te quiero decir? De la prueba falsa que Jorge nos dio? De la noche del cumpleaños de Jane y sparklers, de Sean y sus gatitos? Bueno, aquí hay:

I. Lecciones de Middlebury:
i) que tengo muchísimos parientes de lo que pensaba—una abuelita pelirroja y mexicana, un hermano chileno, etc.
ii) que no puedo bailar la salsa muy bien, pero aún lo disfruto.
iii) que me puedo hacer amigos con personas de más de veinte años… de veinticuatro, veintiséis años.
iv) que es mejor atrevérselo que quedar callado o con miedo.
v) que tengo que viajar a (y quedarme en) algún país hispano-hablante… de veras, güey.
vi) que las personas siempre derraman mucho vino mientras bailan.
vii) que no importa qué blancos son los pantalones… se puede remover las manchas del dicho vino.

II. Traición?
Cuando estaba en Middlebury, me di cuenta de que Arturo ha cambiado su manera de hablar (más lentamente, más claramente) con nosotros durante el semestre pasado. Tiene mucho sentido; éramos estudiantes de nuestro segundo semestre de español, y el acento chileno puede ser bastante difícil de entender. Pese a todo esto, me sentía realmente traicionada cuando esto lo noté—y qué tonto este sentimiento! Lo entiendo perfectamente por qué, pero es como si, de repente, me diera cuenta de que no lo conocía. Para mí siempre ha sido difícil imaginar que mis maestros lleven vidas de las que no sé nada (discúlpame, soy egoísta) pero además, el choque fue que el miedo que siempre en nuestras conversaciones hubiera existido una máscara que escondió su persona verdadera. No sé como describirte el choque que experimenté—no hay mejor palabra que un sentido de traición. Como la primera vez te das cuenta de que tu padre tiene un padre también, por quien él puede llorar. Todavía estos son tonterías, porque tengo confianza en Arturo (como dijo Bryan, “Arturo es muy buena persona.”)
Asimismo me sorprendieron algunos aspectos de las personalidades de mis amigos de Middlebury en sus vidas de verdad—qué restringido parece nuestro conocimiento de los demás cuando tenemos límites del lenguaje así.
Sin embargo, estos descubrimientos no disminuyen las relaciones que ya hemos creado—quizás esto sea el punto detrás de esta bitácora: que la esencia, la parte fundamental, de una persona trasciende algo que somos capaces de explicar, expresar, racionalizar. And because I cannot say this in Spanish: the multiplicity of lives we live does not undermine la verdad ni el valor de una, no matter how contradictory they might be. That every experience that we share with someone is always true, no matter who they might be outside of that particular moment, because who they are is part of that moment and that moment becomes part of who they are.
Y sí, por eso, puedo ser yo y a la vez una espía para el gobierno quien no necesita oxygen para respirar.
III.
un conjunto de palabras asociadas (a ver, qué será la última?)
Bry-Bry, elefantes, indigenismo, quinceañeras, Hombre Súper Gramática, los antepasados de Miguel, el Sendero Luminoso, el nombre de Sean es en el subjuntivo, chupar, Memín Pinguín, Wilfredo Lam, Celia Cruz, Uno Ross Tres, limón, bonito, Jorge “Tres,” súper guay para siempre (para siempre, para siempre…), La Sagrada Familia, atreverse, huecos, Amelie, baila chiki chiki.

this is still a work-in-progress

but por ahora, see la página “about:malentendido” for a partial explanation of this latest insanity.