Zoom Way Back

I used to think that I was pretty technologically hip.

Of course, I thought this back when I was in grade school. My floppy disk was about the size of a piece of bread and actually flopped when I wiggled it. I didn't have Windows on my computer- hell, there weren't even any windows in the entire tiny little computer room they crammed all of my classmates into once a week for "computer class"- and the room (lest you think they were breaking fire code- which they probably were) was really just a little partition off the back of the library where they added a couple of long folding tables set up with giant monitors and CPUs.
The monitors seemed huge compared to today's desktop monitors, however, it was a black screen whose viewing area maybe topped out at twelve inches, with a green cursor. The actual monitor though, whole different ballgame. That thing could have busted out one of those safety glass windows in case of a fire, were we blessed with any such windows, or had we been strong enough at those ages to lift one of those monstrosities. Yes. We were high tech, and loving it.

"Computer class" at that age consisted of a once a week period set aside for the playing of Oregon Trail. Curse you, Oregon Trail. Never once, in all of my illustrious grade school career, did my wagon and oxen team make the entire dangerous trek across the western part of the country without perishing. I lost wheels, I lost family members, I lost oxen due to flood and famine and fording rivers too high for their swimming capabilities. People died of dysentary, drought, and deadly snake bites. I loved that game.

Windows, schmindows, we had DOS, and a little green cursor awaiting our every command prompt! (A:/ blinky blinky blinky anyone?)
Anyhow.... tonight I realized I am terrifiied by one specific commercial, which made me realize I am not technologically hip, which further made me realize I don't really like technology all that much.

It wasn't even a commercial really that scared me, but a product, whose idea seems really ingenious and innocuous. However, being the skeptic I am, I am unconvinced it will actually be used for its supposed purpose.

The product is called a ZoomBak, and is a personal, portable GPS device. For the ultra low price of around $150, the marketing wizards for the company would like you to believe that this super new and ultra cool doodad will help you keep tabs on little Jenny, who just got her license, and can't be trusted to arrive safely at her destination.

So you put the ZoomBak on her car, and get an email (or presumably a text message, since who has the time to be sitting at their own computers all the time when they could be out driving themselves?) when she arrives at her destination. Pretty neat idea, right? Clever and innovative and new.

Here's another fresh, new idea. Don't let Jenny get a license or drive a car if you can't trust her to go where she says she's going to. Wow. There's an idea. Saying "no" to a teenager in this society. Driving is a privelege, not a right. If you don't trust your child, if she's not responsible, don't let her do whatever it is you don't trust her to do responsibly. She must prove her trustworthiness before earning the privilege. Breathing is a right. We will allow Jenny oxygen, and perhaps smog, as we drive away from her, in the cars we earned the right to drive. There, problem solved. Now we don't even have to hear her whine about how uncool we are as parents and how everyone else has one. Blah blah, kid. Cry me a river. Go get a job, but better make sure you can walk to it. Next!

Another marketed use is that you place the gadget on your own car, and should it become stolen, you'll get an email, and then you'll know where it is. Well, huh. I'm stumped as to how we ever managed to live without this before now. Have we never had, oh gee, I don't know, garages? Locks? Failing all of those, policemen, who very nicely come over and file reports and then (if we're lucky) track down our cars, and file more reports, and then (whether we're lucky or not) insurance companies who earn their keep by paying a fraction of what we've paid them over the years? Golly, thanks, ZoomBak, for fixing this dilemma.

So clearly I'm annoyed by this product, but what really scares me is that I can see plain as day what it will really be used for. No one (well maybe the neurotic hover mothers, but no one else) is really going to be using it for what they're marketing it as.

What this horrible thing is really going to be used for is stalking. Let's just say I'm married to some crazily jealous psycho. I'm working on getting out of an abusive situation without causing myself further harm, and he sees this little ad. So he plants one of these cute little buggers on my car. Suddenly he's tracing my every move, and being emailed in real time about every stop I make. He knows when I stop at the police station to report last night's abuse, when I go to my second job, and the address of it. He knows where the new babysitter's house is, because he got the email. He even knows the secure location of the battered women's shelter because even though I made doubly sure I wasn't being followed when I finally gathered up the courage to leave, I didn't know I had a crazy little device planted on the underside of my car.
Let's assume I'm not in an abusive situation. Maybe I'm just some jealous shrew of a housewife who assumes her husband's cheating. I'm stuck at home with three kids under five and bored and lonely. I think he's got some chippy on the side, but I know he'll notice the fees for a PI coming out of our joint account. Being bored one night, I'm lying awake and see this ad. So I decide to buy one- hell, they're cheap! So I slap one on his car, and suddenly I know just where his car was parked, and instead of asking him why it was parked in a residential neighborhood, and learning he was tutoring the blind as part of a reach-out work project, I jump to conclusions and throw my 15 year marriage down the toilet, all because of a gadget.
What if I was some wacky Hannah Montana fan, and put one on her tour bus? Or just obsessed with any random person? Naturally, Jeff thinks this is cool, but I disagree. This thing is Cuh-reepy, with a capital Cuh.

I'd like to zoom back all right. I'd like to zoom way back, to when the only zooming we did electronically was on an imaginary wagon unless a wheel fell off or someone got dysentary. That would put us back a few days, and the going was slow. I don't remember every command prompt I learned, but DELETE was a good one.

I'd like to DELETE a whole bunch of this high tech garbage, and just go back to some low tech stuff. Let's teach our kids the value of Oregon Trail, played on a horrible little screen with green cursors. While it's true there won't be realistic images or vibrating handheld gaming systems, there also won't be portable spy systems attached to their backpacks.

Ode to a Dog

It was said once that a dog's lives were too short, and that that was really their only fault. What other creature would a human so willingly take in as a part of her family, knowing at the beginning of the relationship that the other party would be the first to die? What kind of masochists would we be to continue to seek love from other humans, if the relationship were guaranteed to end without chance of reconciliation before we were ready for it to? While certainly there are relationships that come to an end before our lives are over, none of them is so perfect as the bond between a dog and his master.

I've heard people say their dogs are almost human. Having known and loved many dogs, I find this to be not only vastly untrue, but also an incredible insult on all the canine race. Dogs never lie. They don't judge people based on their looks or style of dress. I've never seen a dog break a promise or spread vicious rumors about another being. Dogs don't share your secrets or let you down. They are much better judges of character than most people, and love without the conditions humans seem to always place on the love they have for one another. The average dog is absolutely much nicer than the average person.

Dogs have no political aspirations. They have no real ambitions, no desire for vengeance, no self-interest. The dog's only real fear is of displeasing a loving master. In return for belly rubs and pats on the head; perhaps the occassional scrap from the table, a dog will bring you joy, comfort you during times of sorrow, and stand by your side faithfully.

A well loved dog is able to sense his master's feelings, and will soothe an angry heart or cheer a sad one with nothing more than the nuzzle of a head or the wag of a tail. A dog's tail can say in minutes what most people's tongues cannot say in hours. He can sense joy, too, and as joy's infectious, he'll revel in that emotion. No friend in this world is better at dividing our sorrows and multiplying our joys as a dog.

There's a difference between a person who is kind to dogs and one who loves them, and if we can't tell the difference, a dog surely can. I currently have two dogs- one who came with a man and has now made himself a part of our hearts, and one who is ostensibly mine- although now she belongs more to my boy than to me, by her choosing; though I've loved many. It's said that an old man misses many dogs. I'd have to amend that to say a lucky old man misses many dogs.
Yesterday I held another dog, an older, smaller one, in my arms as he died. Eddie was my mother's dog, and I was an adolescent when she brought the tiny ball of fluff home. For the first several years of his life, my mother took him everywhere with her. He was never leash trained, but wouldn't go more than two steps from her feet. 18 years later, he knew her schedule and still waited faithfully for her return from work, impatiently sitting at the top of the steps, although he couldn't see her drive up any longer, he simply knew she would be. He'd still follow two steps behind her as she went about her business, and was always happy to know she was near.

As I soothed his sick old body and the doctor administered the drugs that would make him sleep and then stop his heart, I realized that perhaps we don't really own dogs after all, but instead rent them. We should just be grateful when we're given a long lease. It isn't hard to bear their deaths just because we're losing our dearest friends, but also because they're carrying away with them so many years of our own lives.

The dog is the only animal who loves another breed better than his own. Man. How lucky for us, really, to be so loved, without judgement and unconditionally. I think for me, they're sort of the role model for being alive. A dog is your friend, your partner, your companion, your defender. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, until the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.

Nicklebee

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, is something I thought I'd be vaguely in favor of the idea of without forming a conscious opinion of the actual working mechanics of. The way I am in favor of Milk Duds' existence without having to get them stuck in my teeth more than a couple of times to know they're just not for me. Because who doesn't like caramel and chocolate? Who doesn't like education? Well, clearly under the new definition, I don't, since I have kids getting educated under this law in the public school system in America today.

The Nicklebee Law is a lot like a Milk Dud getting stuck in my teeth. It seems like a good idea at the time, but then I have to live with it, and it's sticking to the filling I had put in when I was 14, and I'm really rethinking that impulse buy. A Snickers wouldn't have stuck to my teeth like this, and would have been a lot more satisfying. Sure, it might have cost more to begin with, but in the end it would have saved me a trip to the dentist and tasted better to boot.

I'm not anti-public schools. I went to (and graduated from) a public school, as did all of the members of my immediate family. We're reasonably intelligent, responsible, well-rounded productive members of society. We're all gainfully employed, tax paying citizens who happily contribute to our IRAs and 401ks and vacation in the USA and complain about having to press '1' for English in our own country. None of us have been guests of the state, county, or federal prison or jail system, even for one night. Several of us have held at least a local public office of some type at some point in our lives, as well as other charitable do-good type giving of our time, effort, energy and money. We've got all sorts of different occupations, skill sets, and income brackets represented. Are we spectacular? Well, we like to think so, but in reality, we're just an average family living in your average small town USA.

So obviously public schools prior to the introduction of nicklebee weren't producing solely crackhead dropout illiterate criminals who found it impossible to procure and maintain gainful employment due to our sadly lacking public education system. In fact, I find it insulting that anyone would blame their own stupidity on the public school system to begin with. If they chose not to show up, sit down and learn something, how is making a fancy new law- that's completely impossible to even understand much less make standard across the country- going to fix that? It isn't. What it is going to do, though, is wreck what could have been a good thing for generations of average families like mine.

I have several very specific complaints with nicklebee that I'm going to bitch about now. It seems as if knowledge is power, and the more I learn about the Act, the less empowered (and more grateful I am for my public school vocabulary and typing skills) I feel.

We're all given buzzwords and catchphrases and we hear things like "Title I Funding", but how many of us know what that really means? Does anyone know that that means my gifted student is going to lose his "extra" program that'll keep him wanting to go to school because another child never learned to read before he got to third grade? Now that they're in third grade, it doesn't matter that my child is reading at a sixth grade level, the teacher (who is overworked and underpaid) has no time to worry about keeping my child interested when he asks a more in depth question about the curriculum because she's busy teaching to the mandatory state testing all of the students will face at the end of the year. If they don't score well, the school will lose even more of the funding, and then she'll be out of a job.

Not only that, but she's also studying for a mandatory Master's degree in her spare time, because at any given time the parents of the students who can't read can come barging in demanding to know what level of education she has (also under nicklebee), and how dare she think she's qualified to teach their precious Johnny anything? Never mind that they should be teaching their own children a little something long before this point so that he's on par with my child when he can't be left behind and manages to get into the same classroom. Thanks, nicklebee.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much prefer my child be taught by a teacher who earned her degree from an accredited school rather than from some mail order internet program while concurrently serving her time as a guest of the state, but frankly, I've met some Ivy league graduates, and I think my fourth grader already has more common sense. You just can't teach that.

I also have issues with standardized testing. This NCLB Act is not standard across the country, but instead each state makes its own tests, and therefore whatever NY decides is important to test, and at whatever grade level, is not automattically going to be the same thing that NC or AK is testing.

Which seems like it would be fine, except that I happen to be of the opinion that we should all know the same things. You know, living in the same country, voting for the same president and all.

Math is math. History is history. As we all have the same country, shouldn't we all have the same facts? Not only that, but curriculums are being wrapped around the tests. Why aren't the curriculums being wrapped around the things we want our children to know, and if we were teaching them those things properly the test scores would reflect that naturally? Instead, we're only teaching them the things we know (or have a reasonable suspicion) will be on the standardized tests. I can't be the only person who thinks that is backwards.

I received in the mail this summer my son's third grade standardized test scores. He had a Reading and a Math test at the end of last year, and pretty much all of the year was spent prepping him and his classmates for this test. He had homework in reading and math every night. Not one night did he bring home any in science, history, or any other subject. It was almost as if photosynthesis ceased to exist as long as he learned to spell it properly, and he didn't need to know who won the Battle of Antietam as long as he could pull the numbers out of the word problem (McClellan had 90,000 men, 23,000 people died....)
So, they spent all of the last year prepping for this standardized testing, and I get the results. My bright child scores literally as high as it is possible to score on the reading test, and well above the average on the math. You'd think this would be wonderful, and I'd be incredibly proud of him, right? Well, not so much. You see, I watched him write the word "read" and then the word "letter", and he spelled them "reed" and "leder", and I *know* my child knows how to spell and write them properly, but he knew it didn't matter, and he knew his spelling and writing weren't going to be called to task because frankly, he's the best speller in his class- even with those errors. Teachers don't care if he's in a hurry and rushed through spelling them properly becuase the standardized tests are all multiple choice, and he always chooses the correct bubble when it comes time to. Always.

So, clearly there's a problem. My child is labelled as "bright" (by the school, not by his biased parents), and he's misspelling "read" and "letter"! Okay, so even bright kids can make a mistake, I'll grant you that. But still, if he's bright, (which he is, but I was proving a point), how big are the mistakes that the children who are not even considered average making? Where has nicklebee gone wrong?

There are other issues I have with NCLB as well.

It calls for a 100% success rate. How realistic is that? Clearly, it isn't. So they adjust the 100% to mean 95%, which is of course what they meant all along. Naturally 5% of the country's population doesn't really matter. Which 5%? Well, whichever 5% doesn't do well, obviously! Also, the schools can allow up to 1% of students to be classified as having disabilities.
Here're where the real problems lie. Let's assume you have a perfectly normal but slightly energetic child. Let's further assume this child is a girl, and for the sake of this argument, we'll call her Catie. Let's pretend this girl-child called Catie is 7, and in second grade. Next year, she'll have mandatory statewide testing in reading and math. So far, she's been a little active but pretty average. Her grades haven't been stellar, but her behavior hasn't been atrocious. She's been, well, average. She's popular, maybe a little too popular. She's cute and friendly, and basically an energetic kid who likes school because it's another opportunity for her to be around people. Learning something is secondary to making friends, which is, again average for a kid that age.

Now, Catie is not a "dumb" child, but she is not academically an overachiever. There's nothing wrong with that- average is good! However, due to NCLB, there's pressure in schools for her to be labelled as "hyperactive", or even "ADHD" because she's at all remotely active during the course of the day. However, slapping a label- any label- guarantees the school more money. So if they find a label that suits her, they can continue to get more funding and continue to show improvement in their "special education" departments. The public school she happens to go to hasn't yet exceeded their 1% quota, and so she won't be taking special education from those who truly need it.

If they had met their quota, those who needed it more or were truly classified as disabled would be bused to another school, also promised under nicklebee (so you can guess who gets to finance that American dream), to get more specialized schooling, and because their parents would be fighting for more specialized classrooms for their children- and I know I'm sounding heartless here, but I'll get to that in a bit. Catie is not at all disabled, but would be labelled as such since the school slapped it on her in second grade to garner more funding and massage their own numbers.

In high school, she'd find it incredibly hard to get into regular classrooms and out of the special education rooms, which would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get into college. Her peers would also see her as the kid needing extra help, or the kid in special classes. This is going to perpetuate a vicious cycle of totally bogus victimization that I am royally sick of. You tell a kid who's 7 that she's disabled in any way, and you keep telling her, for the rest of her life, and by the time she's 18 and ready (trust me, she'll be ready) to forge her own way in this crazy world, she's going to believe she's too disabled to get a decent job. Too disabled to go to college on her own dime. Then she thinks she's going to live on welfare forever-or worse, in her mother's house. See where I'm going with this?

It's a pretty simple concept I have. Stop pounding it into people that they can't do things, and suddenly, they'll stop thinking they can't. Sure, some people really can't. Obviously, a man with no legs isn't going to be able to run a marathon. But you give him the tools he needs- a wheelchair, maybe, or a couple of wooden legs, and off he goes. But if you just tell him he can't, well, he never will.

As a parent, I have to fight the school that's supposed to be on my side, and certainly on the side of my child. All because of money that I, as a tax payer, am providing them to begin with. All because of a really stupid law.

So, to make a really long story short, (I know, about time, right?) I have one child who has been labelled "bright", which apparently does him no good. The very school that does the labelling (with which I happen to agree, in this case) lacks the funding and resources due to this law to afford him any opportunities at all. He gets lost in the daily quagmire of mediocrity and then they are further forced to cut the few programs that used to be designed for the bright children. The gifted program is all but gone, which is unfortunate because they apparently are really happy to have such a child scoring so well for them on their mandatory tests.
Then I have another perfectly average child that the school would really like for me to allow them to call something other than "girl with energy", as they'd get a little more money in their coffers if they had some other label on her. However, I am not so quick to jump on this bandwagon. Her scores on tests and in the classroom are perfectly normal. Her penmanship, spelling, and math are actually much nicer looking than her brother's but she wiggles and is chatty so naturally she could be disabled in some way. Or she could just be a seven year old girl.

In the end, it all boils down to money, and nicklebee should maybe be called pennyisn't.