I ran into one of my beloved elementary school teachers over break, and she told me that the school has implemented block scheduling, including 2 hour classes for second graders. As one who finds the 110 minute CC seminars way too long, I was rather horrified. My brothers and I escaped from public education for high school to New England boarding schools. After our great experience in elementary school, the quality of education kept going downhill until we couldn’t stand it anymore. From what I understand, we were there for the glory days of Chester Elementary.

Connecticut’s fantastic Republican (surprise!) governor, Jodi Rell, took a big–and rather unpopular–step when she introduced legislation to make a chunk of public education funding statewide rather than district by district and municipality by municipality. It’s a good first step.

But if we really want to improve public education, we need to bring funding to the federal level. If we don’t, we will continue to aggravate the class gaps in our country: kids who live in Fairfield will continue to get the rich, over-entitled education of which Hartford kids can only dream, to use an example from my home state.

In the mean time, private schools are getting richer and richer. I’m thrilled that my alma mater has recently become need blind so it can admit more and more smart kids from poor families. But, really, those kids should be able to get an adequate education at home.

There are other steps we need to take to improve public education, like incentives for exemplary teachers. I only hope that this issue becomes one that gets real coverage in this election.

[And it might--Obama apparently supports pay-for-performance reforms, an idea that's less popular within the liberal mainstream than you'd think. -Ed.]

American politics is a dog and pony show of the lowest order. Despite the worldwide coverage our presidential elections generate, the attention is hardly deserved. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even political science.

The high-minded among us would like the democratic process to be a contest of ideologies fought in the halls of power. Instead, a presidential campaign is a bare-knuncle brawl between two beauty queens with enornous sums of cash and a legion of expensive stylists. Are you smarter than a 5th Grader? If so, try to tone it down. All that fancy policy talk won’t fly at the Iowa State Fair or Koop’s Frozen Custard.

How do I know? I worked on the frontlines of the 2004 presidential race in Seattle, Washington. Seattle is the most educated city in the United States, where more than 25 percent of residents have at least a bachelors degree. It’s also one of the bluest enclaves on the West Coast. In spite of these fact I heard an unimaginable litany of irrational, inarticulate reasons why people were voting for George W. Bush and why they couldn’t stand John Kerry. Ideas had nothing to do with it.

Pop quiz: how did the Kennedy clan first make its money? If you answered bootlegging and other questionable activities, you are a winner. While we love the notion of Camelot or the image of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket, the reality of our politician’s private lives is something different entirely. We should be distrustful of any person who claims to want to lead us, but instead we follow politicians like sunflowers in the early morning light.

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Remember University Writing, waaaaay back in the day? Remember trying to decipher the instructions for the lens essay and the conversation essay? Remember how your teacher always told you that these were some of the most important writing techniques you’d ever learn, and you should be paying careful attention, because you’d probably use them for every paper you wrote in college?

Remember how cynical you were? Remember how you went, “I don’t know…I took twenty-five APs and four college classes in high school, and none of them ever required a lens essay…”? And the ever-present response: “Well, that wasn’t at Columbia. The work here is much more demanding.” And because it was your first semester *ever* at an Ivy and you were a scared little first-year, you didn’t argue, but continued to quietly bust your butt over the stupid thing.

Well, as a seasoned student, I’m here to tell you: I still haven’t used that lens essay. I get the feeling I never will. And watching other people write in class (and having to edit what they write) makes me realize—the people that could write before can still write. And the people that couldn’t write before are still as bad as ever.

Screw lens essays—we need to be drilling grammar and punctuation here. And we’re supposed to be smart?

The currently uncharted TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL, overlooked by Dante due to its nonexistence at the time: A Lit Hum discussion dominated by a Fundamentalist girl who obviously does not understand the Catholic requirements for entry to heaven. This circle would be chilled to approximately sixty degrees Fahrenheit; the occupants would be dressed in jeans and light t-shirts, and the air-conditioning control would be broken. The sin is as yet unknown (the principle of contrapasso has yet to suggest a crime) but several of us seem to have already been condemned and dispatched.

The discussion would run something like this, looped ad infinitum:

Girl: “But I don’t understand…how does Purgatory work? Didn’t Jesus’ death wash away our sins? They all accepted Jesus into their hearts…that means that they’ve been promised a place in heaven. Right? Right? That’s why Jesus died.”

Teacher: “Well, you see, the Catholic church believed and still believes that even if you’ve led a good life, the sins that you’ve committed won’t just disappear when you die. You need to earn forgiveness for them. It’s cathartic, really – forgiving yourself as God forgives you.”

Girl: “But you don’t have to forgive yourself! God’s already forgiven you!”

Teacher: “As the church saw it, God couldn’t forgive you unless you yourself have come to terms with your sin. To believers, the guilt of the sins (especially sins on the scale of the seven venal sins) was so huge that any form of repentance offered on the human scale was just not enough. To truly receive forgiveness, then, they needed to repent more than they could in the world – hence the penance done in Purgatory, which allowed them to repent on a more divine scale.”

Girl: “They didn’t need to feel guilty, though…”

I’d take burial in ice over that any day.

Internship applications for the summer are either long past due or have quickly encroaching deadlines and I’m stuck applying for things I don’t truly want to do. Aside from the artist fellowship for which I’m throwing in my name and my 10-15 labeled slides, there’s nothing I’ve found that I really want to spend my summer doing. Nothing that could make me enough money to pay rent for four months, that is. My struggle to find a good summer job seems to foreshadow–more than a little–the trouble I will have in the future carving out a meaningful career for myself.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I want to be an artist. Not a painter or a sculpture, not the starving artist type scraping by with two day jobs and an exhibit hanging in a local coffeeshop. (The art hanging here was shockingly bad, but I am consistently impressed by the work of local artists hanging here, far away as it is.)
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As I was sitting in my Frontiers discussion section today, I started copying the (slightly altered) lyrics of the Lamb Chop song along the margins of my notebook.

This, as it turns out, was a mistake – the song wasn’t kidding when it said that it never ends! I didn’t mind at the time – I was kind of bored and found it amusing (this probably says something about my mental prowess, but we’ll gloss over that). In retrospect, however, I realize what a shame it was. I wasted two hours of priceless instruction time. I realized as I glanced through my notes that this class is extremely valuable. Why should I complain? I need to be paying attention! Frontiers is as good as it gets! Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday’s Times featured an article about the enormous endowments of some private secondary schools, focusing on my twin brother’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter now has an endowment of $1 billion, amounting to $1 million for each of the school’s 1000 students. The high school from which I graduated, Phillips Academy Andover has a similarly large endowment, following closely behind Exeter with $800 million. Like Columbia, both schools raise funds fiercely from alumni and parents. While some of it goes towards construction and renovation of facilities, both schools have been focusing efforts on increasing financial aid and making the elite schools–once the haven of the rich and well-connected–accessible to anyone, regardless of income. Both schools have recently become need-blind, with Exeter instituting a policy wherein students whose families make less than $75,000 will be granted a full scholarship. Read the rest of this entry »