Under Assault: teaching in NYC: Palin

October 9, 2008

One question

Would you use your own children as political small change?

Cindy McCain would. Press HERE.

and so would Sarah Palin. Press HERE.:

Dontcha just love those six-pack moms?

September 13, 2008

Steinem says: "Wrong woman, wrong message"

Soon into watching the Charlie Gibson interview the other night, I was already revving up to write a piece on Sarah Palin’s proclivity for wide-eyed, zealous missions that will cause more people to die.

Gibson was asking her about her obvious inexperience and hubris. She responded with what she values: Not blinking and Not thinking.

This world is getting too fast for people my age.

While I was making some mental notes of what I was planning to write on this idiocy, some techie was already posting the very same segment from the interview on YouTube.

Everyone can now see the terrifying reality of this potential future president who would be in a position to not blink and not hesitate our country into more wars, wired as she is to commit missions rather than diplomacy and believing that victory in Iraq is actually definable and possible.

Panicky then and panicky still that our good ol’ bean Barack Obama, modulated college prof that he is, has not been doing nearly enough to win any moderates over to his side, I’ve been thinking with a fair degree of consistency that we are all doomed.

Until someone sent me this Gloria Steinem essay this morning, which appeared in the LA Times.

I can’t say it erases my dark premonitions for the November elections, but perhaps there’s time for enough people to come to their senses and nullify the stupidity.

ADDITIONAL COMMENT 9.14.08:
Ednotes posted a link to the incredible anti-Palin rally that's just taken place.

Lots of pics, video, and a whole bunch of signs like this one:

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."

RESOURCES

October 9, 2008

One question

September 13, 2008

Steinem says: "Wrong woman, wrong message"