Under Assault: teaching in NYC: NY Health Act

From a listserv: July 2023

State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin re-introduced the latest version of the New York Health Act, single payer plan for New York State. The new bill has specific language to address the concerns of some public sector unions opposing the bill, like DC37 and CSEA. It guarantees that members will lose none of the benefits they have in the current plan. Unions supporting the plan include some public sector unions for members of the medical professions, such as (NYSNA) New York State Nurses Association and 1199SEIU, and private sector unions such as Communications Workers of America and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Senator Rivera’s response to State Senators fearful of the change is “We are not trying to build something magical, like a unicorn. Every advanced industrialized nation in the world provides its citizens with universal healthcare. We know how to do this.

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Campaign for NY Health – RESOURCES

Main webpage

Printable resources

Fact sheet, Outreach flyer, Racial and immigrant justice, Myths, What’s new, Petition, County savings, NY Health and Medicare, Endorsers, Social media kit, and many others (some in Sp., Chinese)

Press packet from Nov 2018

The author of this blog

UA retired from teaching after 24 years, having built more than a couple of dozen school choruses and conducted them in well over 100 concerts. Her absences have been infrequent, her ratings satisfactory, and she teaches with enthusiasm. In some years, up to 450 students have passed through her classroom each school year.

UA was a musicologist before she became a teacher and held the position of senior staff editor on the world's largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia of music (The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 29 vols.). She is known for her scholarly work on some of the longest (and most tedious) bibliographical articles in the main work and the subsequent offshoot reference books. She also trained as a coloratura in New York, London and Italy, and has a working knowledge of several other languages.

After a flirtation with rumba and tango, UA wrote a play on ballroom partner dancing called Real Changes, which makes side trips into Zen, intellectualism/eroticism, tragedy/comedy, a parody of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, Nietzsche's early works, and nirvana. (She is still not clear which of these should dominate the psyche, but is happy to have spent four years trying to find out.

Before her recent retirement, UA thought she could pass the remaining years of her career in relative calm. But this was not to be. She was excessed for the second time in her career and was for a year and a half a sub, or in the vernacular, an ATR. A successful grievance restored her to a position, but a principal has many ways to keep someone squirming. Teaching fully out of license was one of them, during which time she lost her desire to teach at all.

It is very hard to tell whether she was excessed in that period because her subject is music (which is not particularly respected in this school system), or because she was becoming too old, too expensive, or too ... "vocal."

Under Assault: teaching in NYC

RESOURCES

NY Health Act

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