In the vein of our friend and Canuck commenter Karen, who apologized for the Olympic closing ceremonies by saying “our best writers were working far from home,” I am only posting this latest Internet sizzle because the writers of DadWagon are too busy with their “jobs” to bring you more of their usual dyspeptic insightful content today.
So here is Eduard Hill, the latest Internet meme… from the Soviet era. John Flowers brought it to my attention on the Twitters. Many years of studying Russian tells me he’s supposed to be singing about coming home finally. Except he’s lipsyncing. And not very well.
UPDATE: No discussion of Eduard Hill is complete without mentioning that he is also the secret truth behind LOST’s Dharma Initiative. Enjoy the awesome:
Poor Nathan: in his attempts to sound “reasonable” and “informed” (what do these silly words mean anyway?), you waste so much time on posts that deny a certain objective truth that you surely, with your fancy-pants education (I highly recommend all readers click through on this link–Latvia and Jazz saxophone? Nathan is a Renaissance-fucking-man) will concede. The truth:
There’s New York and nowhere else. There. I wrote it. Now, can we dispense with the whole “only New Yorkers will care about this post” apologetics and get back to bitching about Pre-k? Thank you.
The reason fine upstanding fellows like Nathan and I are going to slowly go insane trying to educate our children is that there just aren’t enough schools in NYC. Not too few good schools–just too few, period.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and if you have about forty-six years of your life to dedicate to reading a single book, Robert Caro’s stalwart biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, covers almost all of them. Over-priced land, payment of 70s era social triage bills, the collapse of the stock market sending yuppie-puppies into the public system, too much spending on roads and bridges and not enough on schools…take your pick. Bottom line, New York needs more seats to fill with young butts.
Unfortunately, help is not on the way, despite what Republican Education Secretary Arne Duncan says.
Here’s the New York Department of Education’s “understanding of new school needs” as it relates to my district: the DOE will “assess the availability and appropriatness” (my itals) of finding space into which new schools can be “incubated.” Care to have that translated into English: YOU WILL NEVER GET A NEW SCHOOL. BORROW MONEY, STEAL IT, DRIVE A CAB. YOU WILL NOT BE GETTING A FREE EDUCATION IN THIS PART OF BROOKLYN, DICKHEAD.
This, mind you, is in an area where applications for Pre-k track at about 15 applications for every available seat. Then, if the city ever does build a new school, of course you can expect it to be located on a toxic waste dump.
The baby is crying and crying and crying. She’s clinging to her father, grimacing in terror, while around her awkwardly stand four other toddlers, plastic cars in their fat hands, looks of perplexity on their round faces. What is going through their minds? I wonder, glad that the crying child isn’t actually mine. My Sasha is one of the watchers, and soon she turns away, walks over to a miniature table and overturns a box of toys.
This is Sasha’s first day of day care (unlike Nate’s and Ted’s kids, Sasha’s not old enough to be rejected from universal pre-K), and she seems utterly indifferent to the fact that five minutes ago her mother left and that in another five I’ll be gone too. She’s her usual outgoing, independent self, and is delighted to find chairs she can climb up into and a new batch of books to rend and consume. So what if Mom and Dad won’t be around? There’s fun to be had!
Isn’t it supposed to be harder than this? In preparation for today, I’ve been reading various Websites for advice—give the kid a favorite toy or favorite food, bring a family photo the teacher can show her—and we’ve been carefully referring to it as “school” not “day care” or “babysitting.” And we limited our time in the classroom so she wouldn’t expect us to be there all day.
Huh. I guess those things work. The only thing we weren’t prepared for is that Sasha wouldn’t really need us around.
Of course, this is still her first day. I’m half-expecting to pick her up this evening and find the classroom a shambles, the teacher wounded and bald, the other kids cowering in fear of Sasha, and the administrator holding up a large check and asking me never to return. Stay tuned…
Emma Goldman, railing about the lack of Pre-K seats?
Today is March 1st, a notable day around here because the New York Public Schools pre-K program list (here as a .pdf) was posted online at 7 a.m. this morning.
Okay, so this post may be of interest only to me and fellow Gothamists, but here it is: Theodore and I have been complaining about the lack of options for public pre-K. Theodore is putting a deposit on a private school in case it doesn’t work out. We are not: it’s a waste of money, right? But maybe Theodore isn’t such a dummy after all. The news this morning is that a dim situation will only get worse this year for us. In particular, the school right down the block that we had our eye on — the one that was merely ridiculously oversubscribed last year — simply isn’t offering pre-K at all this year.
By my calculations, all of District 3, which covers both West Harlem and the extremely fertile yuppie wonderland known as the Upper West Side, has 406 public school pre-K spots this year, down from 432 last year. The number of applicants for those spots last year: 2,125.
There are schools in District 3 that have slightly fewer kids applying than there are available spots. They are all in West Harlem, where, last time I checked, people are also having kids. We’ve got no compunction about traveling north for school, but I do have to wonder why families there aren’t filling up those schools. Who doesn’t like free education? Is there something so wrong with those programs? Or is Head Start fulfilling the demands as it is?
This month, we will be spending a lot of time in Harlem figuring it all out. I will try not to bore everyone with the details.
