three reasons to go on with this Monday

So how thrilled am I about the Grammys? They are not a thing I usually care about, but any show which builds to the Daft Punk robots and gay weddings is going to propel me through Monday at least a little.

The question "What's more awesome than robots?" WAS rhetorical, until Pharrell showed up.

Also: you don't have to care about Girls anymore. This is such a remarkable instance of liberation that I will say the following:

Lena Dunham, maybe it wasn't you I disliked so much as the system of economic disparity through which your show is able to exist at all. I am sure that, had you made an effort to write about a world  in which the cupcakes come from a bodega and are eaten furtively, at one's desk or cash register, people would have attacked you with equal fervor. And also, good for you for having both a physical body and a body of work, and being able to generate any conversations at all about the latter. 

On the one hand, she's rich and white and educated, but on the other hand, she's a woman and she's talking about her life, and not how to give a better hand job or make a boy like you, so: shut up. And (the character she created and plays, but who is not actually) she dates boys and then has the audacity to screw things up with them, just because, instead of devoting her life to making it up to them that she has all this extraneous tissue messing up the "lines" of her body. Yet when she's attacked, she just keeps making her goddamn show, instead of doing cocaine or losing weight and twerking with Robyn Thick or whatever, so clearly she'd better shut her big, un-cheekboned lady-face.

Except not really. Because for real, Lena Dunham, keep saying whatever damn thing you want, just, like, sitting there in your awesome body that is an actual body I might encounter in life (and yet allow to occupy space without comment because you are talking -- even if you're talking about an experience I have no interest in). 

And finally, paying attention to kids helps them do better!

The company that seems to be behind this endeavor to tutor kids out of poverty is run by the same people who I worked for when I was doing Americorps, back in Boston after I left graduate school. And I believe this is the way to do things with kids who can't do school -- if one can find a way to get college graduates with compassion and work ethics and a grasp of words and numbers to spend a year working intensively with at-risk teenagers instead of, like, backpacking or doing stupid internships in Williamsburg.

My own program is an effort to build on that initial program in Boston, one that makes a couple of unfortunate missteps -- although, to be fair, its in its first year, in an environment with several competing agendas. If you believe that socialization and dance lessons are equally as important as mastering basic academic skills, you are unlikely to instill those skills in kids who would much prefer the first two options. Also: perhaps a "choice-based" program that relies on children to choose, for example, to learn to read, is asking too much of your average eleven year old.

This program, though -- in Chicago? Not much choice here. Get with the program, or deal with unsavory consequences. Not the way I was raised or taught -- the public schools where I grew up handled kids with my profile with a sort of benign neglect. But one can afford that when one's students are lugging The Second Sex and histories of women in science to school, when their idea of rebellion is to obnoxiously spout libertarian talking points at their "socialist" peers in AP English. My ability to motivate myself stemmed from a fear of being hungry and homeless that only really works if not having an education really will lead to hunger and homelessness -- which requires the absence of the safety nets that now mean one can have a cell phone, but not a job. (Note: I'm not saying we should get rid of those nets. It's not fun to be seven and scared of one's future employment prospects, and I don't think kids should go hungry, no matter what. I am saying that fear and shame were effective motivations for me as a child; without them, it's reasonable that we need a different kind of pressure to get kids to learn).

My frame of reference for why I think this kind of program will be more successful than mine currently is is actually the time I spent in treatment for my eating disorder. Uncool people who I thought didn't know anything, who made me do what they wanted and failed to overlook a single deviation from The Plan. People who flat out did not care if I disagreed or found their ideas and instructions unappealing, who were not interested in being sensitive to my vantage point. This inflexibility was extremely useful in breaking down a disease that has proved as intractable in my life as illiteracy has in my kids'. 

There's an obvious misstep here in which I seem to be equating my DSM-IV worthy psychiatric diagnosis with the environment in which my kids grow up, and the attitudes they have. It depends on what you want out of life, I guess. The privilege I experience is real, but so is the fact that none of the jobs and opportunities I have had would have been possible for me without the academic ability/SAT score/GPA/work history that I had. Being white helped, but a person who couldn't read, couldn't have done any of the jobs that have enabled me to have the life I have. So fighting racism is one thing -- and there is a disturbing conflation of white people's desire to not deal with the ongoing racism that exists with the reality that, racism notwithstanding, it doesn't help anyone to read at a fourth grade level. We need to resist the temptation of saying that because I prefer helping kids learn to dealing with racism and privilege, there's no longer any need to resist racism. 

But we also need to be able to admit that there is a difference between freedom and license, and letting kids do what they want, or bending over backwards to accommodate their preferences when they are eleven years old and their preference is to not learn, is not actually empowering them. After struggling for the past four months to negotiate this as the bizarre conglomeration that I am (daughter of an Appalachian redneck and a first generation American; white as the paper my non-profit checks are printed on, but essentially uncomprehending of "New York white people values"), it is a relief to see people with the power to actually change the coarse of efforts like mine saying: actually, for our program to meet its goals, these kids need to sit down, shut up, and learn.