As I try to sift out the experience of a week, sometimes I reach a point of desperation that comes out in the form of questions. Some recent ones:
- The post-Santa Barbara conversation over misogyny in the “nerd” community has gone in some interesting directions. But I have to say, did no one recognize the arrant misogyny as well as the unspeakable arrogance in the opening scene that set the up the rest of the Facebook movie? I couldn’t sit through the whole of the film; the contempt with which the principal characters treated anyone who wasn’t a “friend” or a sycophant was unbearable, and I walked out. I know it was a movie, so presumably the producers dialed up the extreme unpleasantness of the characters for effect, but still. We watched the humiliation of the woman from B.U., and we’re shocked to discover that sometimes people treat women abominably? Not that I’m willing to go along with the idea that tech folks have some special claim on misogynistic attitudes.
- My cousin, a a grief therapist from Sandy Hook whose own children went through the elementary school there (and who this past spring retired and moved West), had to take to social media—okay, it was actually Facebook—to speak out against the people who have used Santa Barbara to once again put it out there that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. Good lord, what kinds of crazies are we producing?
- The public schools in New Orleans have all gone the way of the dodo. It’s all charter, all the time now. And apparently one unit of the new city system has granted itself the right to segregate at will. The re-segregation of public schools is an open secret, but apparently this is no longer an area of judicial concern. Did I just lose fifty years?
- The estimable Josie Holford tweeted last week on the #isedchat that “A school in May is like a 2- year-old deprived of a nap.” I’ve certainly been on the listening end of an extraordinary number of May tales this year, shockers all. Can we all just find our rest mats and have a nap, please, now that it’s June?
I’ve actually been working on a number of projects that are pretty exciting—an article for Independent School, a proposal for some professional development work at a school for next year, the reconstruction of the Independent Curriculum Group, a reading workshop this summer for a school, proposals for NAISAC15, a couple of upcoming Twitter chats, three workshops for the AISAP Annual Summer Institute, and some heartening follow-up work for a client. Some of this is fodder for future posts here, I think, as I keep learning things and running across new perspectives that challenge and inspire me. And one of my kids just graduated from college, a beautiful event on a beautiful day—a day to redeem May of 2014 as we enter June.
I just needed to work through a couple of the oddities of the past week or so.