Nerd Girls: Go Read Now

I have spent much of the afternoon reading "Fine Lines," a feature at Jezebel where the author reviews/reminisces about/analyzes the must-read novels for any chick bookworm growing up in the 80s. All afternoon I've been laughing out loud and going, "OMG, I totally thought that too!"

I love YA fiction generally, so this has been fantastic fun for me. Among my favorites as a child was The Girl with the Silver Eyes; one of my favorites still is Alanna: The First Adventure. Yes, I go buy every Tamora Pierce novel as it comes out, you wanna make something of it? (In fact, one of my friends who just finished a Ph.D. in children's lit went to an academic conference where Pierce was speaking and she's so super-cool she took my favorite book by Pierce (Squire, from the "Protector of the Small" series) and got it autographed for me. Tamora Pierce autographed it in purple ink, which is also super-cool.)

But one important question reading these Fine Lines raised for me, and for half the commentors on the post, and I expect for all my female readers of about my age, is: WHY THE HELL WERE OUR MOTHERS LETTING US READ V.C. ANDREWS AT AGE 12? That shit's DISTURBING. Of course nobody much over the age of 12 is interested in reading V.C. Andrews because it's absolute trash -- entertaining, fast-reading, titillating trash, but still trash, and of course adults have access to higher-quality trash. (And reading V.C. Andrews in junior high doesn't seem to have done me any lasting harm, other than a continuing dislike of codicils since they lead to children being locked up in attics and poisoning people with arsenic-topped doughnuts.)

Mr. McGee's comment upon my questioning why everyone reads V.C. Andrews at age 12 given its disturbing content was something to the effect of, "There's plenty of disturbing content in things children read, like the Iliad and the Odyssey."

Which makes me think I didn't adequately explain how V.C. Andrews works, because there's not really a universe in which V.C. Andrews should be mentioned in the same sentence as Homer. Aw, crap, now I went and did it too.

I'm slightly tempted to go read Flowers in the Attic now, but I think The Witch of Blackbird Pond is calling my name. (Did anyone else read that other colonial young adult novel, the one where she lives in this Puritan settlement and gets kidnapped by Indians and escapes to Quebec or somewhere and becomes a dressmaker and gets all interesting and lively and is going to marry this wealthy French-speaking guy and then her Puritan boyfriend shows up to take her home and turn her into a dull-ass, black-wearing, fun-hating Puritan, and in the most disappointing YA novel ending EVER, she totally goes with him? What was that book?)

(Oh, wait, the internet says it's Calico Captive and it's by Elizabeth George Spears too, which is probably why I thought of it. So don't read that one.)

Like a Girl

"Wednesday morning?" says I.

*Hysterical laughter*

"....."

"I'm sorry, we're having a terrible thunderstorm." *Giggles*

"Right, I'm having it too."

"Well, we just had a lightning strike right outside the garage bay. One of the technicians screamed like a girl." *Hysterical laughter*

"AWESOME."

Mr. McGee in PJ Star

There's a nice interview with my husband in the Lawn & Garden section of the Peoria Journal-Star today, talking about our reel mower. Jenny Davis did a great job, as usual! It doesn't appear to be up on the PJS's website, or I'd link to it.

Oh, PS -- we'd appreciate a couple of extra copies so we can mail one to his mom if anyone has the section lying around. :)

Update: Thanks Dewayne -- he caught it online so you can check it out if you want!

District 150 Needs to Change

As every single one of my Peoria readers knows, District 150 wants to cut 45 minutes out of the elementary school day to save $645,000ish, or 1/2 of 1% of their budget. Not a big impact on the budget, but obviously a huge impact on the children of Peoria. (See Diane Vespa's ongoing coverage.)

District 150 is wickedly difficult to run. I get that. It's operating under catastrophic budget issues left to it by Kay Royster and the Aaron Schock-led school board. (Seriously, people, do not give him power over federal taxing and spending. SERIOUSLY.) There's a shortage of qualified superintendents in Illinois, and nationwide. (If Paul Vallas is available, Peoria, GRAB THAT MAN WITH BOTH HANDS AND DON'T LET GO.) Almost 3/4 of District 150 students -- 69.3% in 2007 -- are low-income. A third of them (30.1%) move every year. Out of 14,000ish students, 686 are reported as chronically-truant, but I don't think that number tells even half the story: You talk to teachers in the district, and you hear kindergarten teachers talking about KINDERGARTENERS who are truant because they're at home caring for even younger children! These are problems the district can't do much about, other than the legacy budget issues.

But District 150 is making a botch of it left, right, and center. It would help immeasurably if the School Board and administration of District 150 would address the following issues:

OPENNESS: Operate under an openness policy. It seems to me that the District leadership has developed a defensive posture, which appears to be a combination of 1) a desire to discuss sensitive (but public) matters behind closed doors to avoid controversy; 2) a sense that, because sensitive issues are kept private, citizens "don't understand" the issues and so should accept the leadership at its word; and 3) a dislike of coming under criticism. There's also a history of crap PR-driven "justifications" for decisions the District leadership has made. As many have cited, the District in the past claimed we needed to spend more to expand the elementary school day to achieve educational excellence. Now the District claims we need to contract the elementary school day to achieve educational excellence. And that whole Glen Oak Primary debacle was full of misdirection and confusion.

Solutions: Bring it all out into the open, kiddos. District 150 is a public body and the public has the right to run it. LET US. Be honest. Don't feed us a bullshit line about shorter school days leading to educational excellence. Tell us the budget is in dire straits and we have to make tough choices -- whether that choice is a tax referendum, closing certain schools, jettisoning administrators, shortening the school day, or just fiddling while Rome burns. That choice is OURS, not yours, and you might be shocked how many District 150 parents and taxpayers understand the concept of "tough choices."

Understand that your history of closed-doors and misdirection and PR-babble is going to take time to overcome, and only openness, forthrightness, and honesty will do that -- and that includes making a SHOW of honesty as well as actually being honest. You must avoid even the appearance of half-truths or secret knowledge or generalized obfuscation.

(Also, if criticism makes you publicly defensive, neither school administration or public office is the proper place for you to be. Be defensive at home to your spouse or dedicated sounding board. You answer to the public at work, and the public is critical. Which brings us to:)

ANSWER THE PUBLIC: There's enormous frustration in Peoria about the refusal of the School Board and administration to address issues of public concern, instead focusing on the leadership's latest concern -- which has come to mean, in the public mind, the leadership's latest harebrained scheme. Administrator top-heaviness is one notable issue; the entire Glen Oak debacle was another.

Solutions: Answer public concerns. If that means you have to hold an extra school board meeting, or Hinton sits down at a "listening session" every month for a year, then that's what it means. We employ you. We have a right to answers to OUR concerns. Hinton made $202,390 for 2006-2007; the median household salary in Peoria is $40,276. We have two associate and one assistant superintendents. ALL of our high schools have failed NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress measures. ONE THIRD of our schools are in school improvement status under NCLB (9 of 30: Manual High School; Sterling, Trewyn, and Lincoln Middle Schools; Loucks-Edison, Tyng, Harrison, and Garfield Primary Schools; and Roosevelt Magnet). It's not unfair for parents and taxpayers to demand justification for the administrative salaries and the number of administrators in District 150 when our district is failing so badly. Are all those administrators worth their feed? I realize school administration, particularly in a district with the challenges District 150 faces, is a complex and difficult job. However, it's up to the administration to make its case persuasively to parents and to answer their concerns. When we're down to cutting 45 minutes from the elementary school day to save a paltry $645,000, when we've come to the point where we can't even afford educational TIME, I think whether we can afford our present administration is a totally legitimate question, particularly when the administration has failed to deliver important objectives.

CONSULTANTS AND OTHER ODD EXPENSES: How many do we need, seriously? Isn't making educational decisions what we pay four superintendents for? Haven't the past several basically told us things that were either common sense or that we already knew?

Solutions: Consulting itself is an issue, but it also stands in for a larger issue of non-instructional expenses not directly related to running the school's physical plant, and the need for those expenses to be justified to taxpayers.

If the consultants are adding value that justifies what we're paying them, the district needs to make that case persuasively to parents and taxpayers. And for the consulting that's necessary, couldn't some of it be provided pro-bono locally? We have multiple colleges locally with education departments with talented professors with a lot of expertise in these problems. We have the Great Yellow God (I say that affectionately), Caterpillar, which has Six Sigma experts out the wazoo and has shown willingness in the past to work with local governmental bodies and lend its expertise and/or snowplows. Heck, we have at-home moms with kids in the district who were high-powered attorneys, PR professionals, consultants, corporate planners, accountants, etc., before opting to stay home. Why aren't we drawing on that resource? We have retired professionals invested in the community. What about them? And for consulting that must be outsourced to specialists, how much of the work (data gathering, etc.) can we do in-house? Will they work with us to cut those costs to the bone?

BOTTOM LINE: The bottom line is this: I don't want to move. I like living in Peoria. I like living south of War Memorial, where there are sidewalks (in questionable repair, but sidewalks) and neighborhoods and I can walk to most things, instead of up north in car-focused subdivisions (not neighborhoods) where you must drive everywhere. I believe in public schools; I don't want to have to opt out of the public system or move to get my hypothetical children an adequate education.

There are great teachers in District 150; I serve with some in the Junior League, I know others socially. There are great students in District 150, too: I get them in my classroom at ICC, so I feel uniquely well-suited to say, "Heck yes, District 150 can provide a great college-prep education." But what we don't have is a great District, and I'm so afraid that the failing District will drive out the great teachers and take the great students down with it. It's time to stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It has to change. It's time to change.

And if they won't change?

Throw the bums out.

Finals Grading: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

It's that time again -- well, it's been that time for the last week and a half, and yesterday I posted two sets of grades, so I have two left (my biggest class and my smallest class). Lots of eyestrain, lots of Euro-trance music for motivation (DJ Tiesto FTW!), lots of pounding the desk with my head in frustration.

Good: So-so student who showed up, did the work, but never seemed to really "get it" and her grades reflected that. I helped her pick a book I thought would interest her for her term paper, which it did, and she knocked that sucker out of the park, so far out on to Waveland that she pulled an "A" for the class. Woohoo!

Bad: Take-home final so dog-eared (after a long weekend in the student's possession) that it was falling apart as I graded it. It also reeked so strongly of smoke that I had to air it out before I could stand to grade it. Sign you smoke too much: When your professors can't grade your papers without coughing fits.

Ugly: When it says in all caps on the instructions for the paper "NO FIRST OR SECOND PERSON," I wasn't actually kidding. Hence the all-caps.

When I said, "You may not cite to Cliff's Notes or SparkNotes," I wasn't kidding about that either. Hence the italics.

"Everybody's immoral in America today," is actually an assertion, not a fact that backs up your thesis that some philosopher was right about moral decay.

Inserting random numbers in your text is not actually "citation." (And you thought I wouldn't check, ha!)

Britney Spears does not work for Disney; Jamie-Lynn worked for Nickelodeon and is the one who got pregnant at 16. (At least get pop-culture references correct! And it's "Britney," not "Brittany.")

Eight pages describing the plots of random Japanese movies I have never heard of is not actually a thesis, particularly when the paper never even mentions the book it's ostensibly about.

On a final note: Staplers are not strange and exotic creatures that can only be captured by the light of the full moon in the deepest forests of Borneo. You can actually purchase them at the grocery store. Maybe even a red Swingline. For the love of God, students, BUY STAPLERS AND USE THEM.

At My Mothers' Knees

I wrote this back in 2000 for Mother's Day. Ran across it and thought I'd release it into the wild under a Creative Commons license, specifically:


At My Mothers' Knees by Laura S. Petelle is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at eyebrowsmcgee.blogspot.com.

If you like it, you can snag it in .doc, .txt, or .pdf at these links. If you republish, please e-mail me a link. Hope you enjoy.

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At My Mothers’ Knees
By Laura S. Petelle

Those early years all blend together, from when I was about three until I was maybe twelve. It’s all one long summer of sand and sun, bare feet and itchy clothes.

Every summer, for twenty-seven years, my mother’s family came from far and wide to spend a week at The Beach. That’s what we called it – The Beach. It was Ocean City, Maryland, but it didn’t need a full name, because it was The Beach, the most important of family institutions. We anticipated it all summer, cried when it was over.
It wasn’t until I got older that I began to appreciate what the adults gave up for us so that we could be close to our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It’s not everybody’s idea of fun to spend a week with their parents, adult siblings, and a herd of noisy children in close quarters, especially if it’s the only vacation of the year. But year in and year out, my mom and her brothers and sister and their spouses all made their way by car and plane, from Illinois, or Wisconsin, or Massachusetts, or Virginia, or Kentucky, to The Beach. Every year they did dozens of loads of laundry, made hundreds of sandwiches, mediated scores of spats.

But we children never knew how much work went into this sublime sun-drenched week. For us, it was a week of sheer bliss, packed into two condos with all of our cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. We had unaccustomed freedom as the adults chatted, and a pack of built-in playmates, plus the lure of the beach itself, with the acres of sand and crashing waves. It all rolls together in my mind to an endless parade of sandcastles and salty lips and stringy hair.

In the end, there were thirteen cousins. Nell, Big Mike, and I were the oldest, and I desperately wanted to be included with them rather than the three Bubbas – Pat, Chris, and Brian – who were all the same age and came next, two years after me. After them were Danny, Kate-o, and Kevin. Then Jamie and Michael, the same age, and last of all Will and Rachel. But what I remember most about those years are my aunts. I had four of them, plus my mother, with Aunts Cathie and Carolyn playing the young “cool” aunts. What stands out in my mind about those earliest years is Aunt Janet, Aunt Ellen, and my mother – a trifecta of mothering.

In those heady days at the beach, when I was waist-high and the world seemed to exist in two distinct levels – those of us whose heads didn’t reach the countertops and those who stood near the ceiling – my mother was suddenly multiplied. I would patter around the condos busy on errands only my child’s mind understood, and every now and then I would be confronted by a woman’s knees and a kind, smiling voice, and I would look up – up – up and see my mother, or Aunt Janet, or Aunt Ellen inquiring about the events of my little world.

While the whole week revolved around grandma and granddad, it was the aunts who made it run. It was the aunts who made the meals – the same every year, from lasagna night to crab night to pepperoni bread night, with donut holes and cereal for breakfast and grilled cheese and tuna for lunch. It was the aunts who did the laundry, the aunts who made the beds (with enforced help from Nell and I), the aunts who did the shopping.

In that one magical week, Aunt Janet’s grilled cheese sandwiches were just as good as my mom’s. Aunt Ellen was just as good at kissing owies. And if they seemed more like my mom, my mom seemed more like my aunts, less likely to yell when I made trouble.

In that wonderful week, I would walk up to my Aunt Janet just as imperiously as I would my own mother and demand that she “goop me” as my mother was busy smearing sunblock on one of her nephews. I would beg and whine to Aunt Ellen for extra donut holes as if she were my own mother – no company manners there. And I watched as my mother adopted nine extra children as her own, changing diapers and making lunch for a baker’s dozen of children.

Of course their husbands were there too. When I think of my uncles, I remember them reading the Washington Post, and if you asked nicely, Uncle Bob or Uncle Gene would usually be able to find you the comics section. Uncle Dick and Uncle Jack and my dad were the lifeguards and mission commanders, organizing the massive trek down to the beach every morning, assigning this cousin to carry the umbrella, that one to carry two chairs, this one to carry the blanket. They decided when we could get in the water and how deep we could go, and they took the babies into the shallows to splash in the waves.

But it was the aunts who made it heaven. It is their knees and their smiles that I remember most, these glorious aunts of mine. A pair of female legs would step into my path, a pair of smooth-shaven legs with knees that grew more wrinkly with age, and I would stop my rushing steps and look up into the divine smiles of mothers.

They were always smiling, my aunts and my uncles. The years seemed to drop away from them at The Beach. They have all grown wrinkles and bellies and gray hair with age, but still when they smile I am transported back to the eternal summer of The Beach. At The Beach they were children, teenagers. Uncle Dick knew the best way to dig a hole in the sand. Uncle Bob told the same joke over and over – and we always fell for it. Aunt Ellen would nearly always give in, with a look of disapproval that was never effective because her eyes were twinkling, when we teased her for an extra donut hole. And my mother seemed like a girl, laughing and teasing, more carefree than she ever seemed at home.

They would sit around the adult table long after dinner was done, retelling family stories as we hung over the couches or crawled into their laps or played quietly with our toys in the deepening dusk. That was the best time, when our parents would be laughing so hard they cried. I can see them now, the deep rolling laugh of my grandfather at the head of the table, the hearty chuckles of my uncles, my mother with tears streaming down her face as she gasped for breath. My mother and her brothers and sister dredging up stories from their childhood, my aunts and uncles remembering wedding stories, my grandparents embarrassing them all. Some of the stories were the same every year – the time Nell switched all the tags on the wedding presents, the time Chris fell asleep with a mouth full of hamburger – and some would have a sudden resurrection from the depths of memory. But nothing was ever forgotten, nothing could ever be lived down. And we listened hungrily to learn the stories that made us family, so that we too could repeat them one day.

The room was full of laughter, so loud it would echo through my child-sized head, sometimes hurting my ears. The laughter was almost a living thing. Was this what being an adult was like? This endless laughter? I would shift in my seat, itching where the sand was still in my clothes, bask in the salty sea breeze that rolled in from the waves, and revel in the happiness around me.

My aunts and uncles grew older, and inevitably I did too. I stretched from childhood into gawky adolescence, and eventually slid into adulthood, without gaining the extra inches I had so hoped for. My uncles grew bellies and my aunts’ capable arms began to sag. They grew wrinkles from mortgages, gray hair from driving lessons, and those knees I so loved began to resemble elephants’. In time, the chill hand of death touched our family, and I saw my uncles cry. In time, I learned that family meant tears of sorrow as well as tears of laughter. In time, I saw that my aunts and uncles were only human, and I loved them more for it.

But they never stopped smiling and they never stopped laughing. And now, when we gather as a family, some faces gone from us and some new to the clan, we cousins can join in when the stories are retold. Now, as I tiptoe into the hallowed hallways of adulthood, I can glimpse why their laughter is so rich with joy, so different from the laughter of my teenaged friends. It’s a laughter that grows out of love, and all its attendant joy and sorrow. It’s the laughter of people who have loved deeply and unreservedly.

And now, when my mom and Aunt Ellen and Aunt Janet smile, their faces relax into labyrinths of lines and those who admit it wear their gray hair like crowns. But in their happy faces and sparkling eyes, I can see more than a score of summers stretching out behind them, smell the sea air of my childhood, hear the lonely call of the gulls across the years. I see them as young wives, and harried mothers of teenagers, and a wonderful trinity of mothers, six knees all in a row, smiling down at me like a benediction.

Objection! Objection!

Some lawyers think if they just object to everything, whether their objections have any merit or not, they can win by turning every hearing into a war of attrition. My husband's analysis of a recent frustrating hearing he had:

"Objection, your Honor! I think I heard some argument in his argument!"

"Sustained."

"Objection, your Honor! He's citing to case law!"

"Sustained. Counselor, please restrain yourself."

Extension Regains 2008 Funding

(Note: I tried to format this thing three times. It is determined to be ugly.)

Press Release from the U of I Extension:

Fiscal Year 2008 Funded for U of I Extension, Focus Shifts to 2009

Contact: Gary Beaumont, 217-333-9440, beaumont@uiuc.edu

Urbana -- On May 2, 2008, University of Illinois Extension received the memorandum of agreements from the Illinois Department of Agriculture for fiscal year 2008 funding. Two line items have been in question, County Board Match funds ($12.8 million) and the Cook County Initiative funds ($5.055 million). These two line items were included in the FY08 State of Illinois budget that was signed into law late in August 2007, but the distribution of funds was held up until now.

County Board Match funds are provided by the State in support of Extension programs at the county level. All counties provide funding for their local Extension offices. The state, in turn, matches this funding.

The Cook County Initiative is targeted funding for Extension to address the critical needs of audiences in Cook County . Funds have been appropriated annually since FY06.

"Since the receipt of the memorandum of agreements, they have been under internal review and the signature process is underway at the university level," said Dennis Campion, director of University of Illinois Extension . "After all the university signatures are in place, the agreements will be returned to IDOA for signature and processing, so it may still take one or two weeks before payments arrive."

Campion expects two payments, one to catch up through the first three quarters of the fiscal year and then a final payment expected to arrive sometime during the fourth quarter. The State of Illinois fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30.

Also, a sum of $33,900 will also be received for U of I Extension's 4-H Youth Development program.

"At this time this is the only amount that we have for this purpose. We continue to seek clarification regarding the intentions of the legislature regarding these funds," said Campion.

In August 2007, Governor Blagojevich line-item vetoed funding for 29 youth development educator positions from the FY08 Illinois budget. Last year, Extension issued notices of non-reappointment for people in these positions.

There are bills in the House and Senate to reinstate 4-H youth development funds. SB1921 and HB4228 are posted for hearing by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, May 8, 2008. Extension Partners (extensionpartners.org) will continue to work for youth development funds with a goal of having an Extension youth education position for every county in Illinois .

U of I Extension was in unprecedented territory with the threat of total rescission of its funds. Typically these funds are delayed in arriving on time, but have never been rescinded.

Extension is now turning its attention to fiscal year 2009.

"While there are good intentions, we have heard a variety of budgeted amounts for County Board Match, Cook County Initiative and youth development funding. With this amount of uncertainty in the system, we continue to review plans to protect the overall financial health of our organization," said Campion.

"Until a more thorough organizational outlook is undertaken, existing terminal contracts and layoff notices will not be rescinded at this time."

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