I don't do zone

Our three and a half year old niece was visiting last weekend with Michele's mom. Nothing like spending 24-7 with a little kid to curb the "breeder" urge. I love Abby- she is completely adorable (Above: she curled up and fell asleep on the landing of the second floor so she could hear us talking downstairs) and tons of fun. Abby is smart and she has a fantastic laugh. Michele's brother and sister-in-law now have 3 kids- Abby, a one year old, and an infant! In less than 5 years! These people are crazy. Either that or they just hope to re-populate the Earth with libertarian, slow-package-openning engineers. And regardless, 3 is too many. Unless you are planning on cloning yourself or your spouse, man-on-man coverage is no longer an option. And in my eyes, kids have the number on every zone defense in the book. And I don't know about you, but I can't play zone. Thus the need to have a maximum of 2 kids at all times.

I like kids, don't get me wrong. I don't have kid-fear like some people I know (ahem, Michele). But being someone never to enter into a situation lightly, I take the prospect of having kids pretty seriously. Maybe it's because for me there will be no "happy accidents." It's not a bad deal, actually, since I'm already a planner by nature. Not to restate the obvious, but a kid is a lot of work. And honestly, I don't really mind playing the selfish card and being up front about the fact that I don't see myself having time for a kid anywhere in the near future. I kinda like this aunt gig, where I can hang out with them for a while and then give them back. It's responsibility-lite. After the last week I'm putting a five year hiatus on any possiblity of having kids. There is too much going on in my life to even think about it. And I know that right now I'd much rather spend my free time with Michele, with friends, with books and food and beer and wine. And I'm okay with that. We can have the intelligent, progressive people-need-to-have-more-babies conversation later.

Save us from SCOTUS

As the 2006-2007 term comes to a close there has been constant stream of bad news coming out of the Roberts court. From racial diversity in schools and student speech to reproductive rights and faith-based funding, the Supremes have churned out a series of disappointing 5-4 decisions that gut key progressive ideals. Let's just say that I'm not anxiously awaiting the first Monday in October.

one is the loneliest number

as a graduate student it's difficult to not exist in a bubble. spending long hours performing experiments, analyzing and mulling over data, and constantly troubleshooting problems- such is my life. often, I am so focused on my own work, my own very tiny contribution to my field, that I sometimes forget that science doesn't occur in a vacuum. in order for my work to make the greatest impression on my colleagues, I must strive to see how it applies to the state of what is already known, to others' research. I can't just think about staring at small glowing cells to determine what they mean to me- I must be able to make as many connections between my story and what everyone else thinks is relevant.

speaking with the science teachers from St. Louis public high schools that I'm working with this summer, I came to the conclusion that science has the most impact for students when it is recognized as a body of knowledge. in most cases, students are presented with science as a series of isolated concepts and facts. it's only when they realize (if they are even given the opportunity to do so) that these facts build something together, interact and fit like puzzle pieces, that science becomes powerful! imagine what a science classroom that recognized this could produce, one that worked with students to help them create and structure a body of scientific knowledge. I dream of high schools graduating scientifically literate individuals, ready to apply their analytical skills to the work world, to move into the health and technology jobs of the next 50 years. we have a long way to go...

Help Save Internet Radio

My partner often tells me that if it wasn't for me, she'd still be listening to Sarah McLachlan and thinking she was cool. Not that there's anything wrong with Sarah- the Lilith Fair was one of the higlights of my late adolescence, the height of all things "grrl power!" But musicians like Sleater-Kinney, Belle and Sebastian, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, and Yo La Tengo probably wouldn't have crossed her radar screen were it not for my influence. I chalk up my serious musical chops to a couple of crucial points: 1. my Dad, who raised me on James Taylor, Elvis Costello, the Who, and the Beatles (the theme of my college admissions essay was the Abbey Road album), whose LP collection is a thing of enormous beauty (something completely lost in the world of CDs and MP3s) and 2. growing up in Nashville, TN; aka Music City; aka Nashvegas. I attended my first concert at age 6 (the Bangles, with my Dad, who was infatuated with Suzanna Hoffs Michael Steele at the time) and spent a large portion of the 18 years before I left for college in venues watching live performances ranging from Mary Chapin Carpenter to REM to James Brown. Nashville was home to high school punk rock bands, all-ages shows, and a great local radio station, Lightning 100. Though it was a commercial station, it exposed me to independent artists, from Lucinda Williams, Beth Orton, and Patty Griffin to Ben Folds and David Mead. When I left for Philadelphia I discovered WXPN, a non-commercial public radio station that played fantastic music. Home to the nationally syndicated radio program World Cafe, hosted by David Dye. I quickly became addicted to XPN- I listened constantly; it was the soundtrack to my time in Philadelphia. The diversity of the music and the lack of commercialism was something that, even in Nashville, I had never experienced before. After leaving Philly I remained an avid listener, now to the on-line stream, and I even became a member of the station last fall. XPN keeps me musically sane in a time of, well, let's just say that if I heard Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" one more time I think my head would explode.

So now for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. Recently the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided to exponentially raise the fees charged for streaming music over the Internet. These fees will go into effect July 15th and stations will have to retroactively pay fees for the last 17 months. The increase is in fact so large that the price-tag is higher than what most stations even make off of these streams. The CRB's decision will have a profound impact on independent and public radio stations, like XPN, who work to promote local and up-and-coming artists. XPN believes that musicians should be paid for their work, but the fee increase will unfortunately harm the small-name musicians and the radio stations that play them- and not the Britney's and Beyonce's of the music business. Working with allies in Congress, the House has introduced HR 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would override the CRB's decision and set the fees at the same level as satellite radio (7.5% of revenue). There will be a debate this week in the House Small Business Subcommittee about the potential effects of the CRB increase. In an effort to raise awareness, XPN and many other stations will be participating in Internet Radio Day of Silence on Tuesday, June 26th. You can log onto XPN's website and sign their petition on Tuesday. More information can be found at SaveNetRadio.

Education Reform: Pot, meet Kettle

Here's something that frustrates me about academia: an individual "authority" shouting down from her Ivory Tower to criticize an alternative model that has been shown to function well in the real world, outside the traditional walls of the academy. The latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education includes a somewhat negative piece about Teach for America. Granted, I am a TFA alum (Baltimore '02), and may be a bit biased about the impact of the corps. Below are some of the criticisms from education academics:

1. Teach for America does not adequately prepare its teachers for the schools they will enter.
2. Teach for America corps members do little good by only completing their two year teaching commitment and then moving on to other careers.
3. Teach for America is not a viable solution to the education crisis in the United States.

In response to these critiques, I will concede that I do not completely agree with everything that Teach for America as an institution has done. But, I do strongly believe that in essence TFA works and has made a significant change in the direction of the education reform conversation in this country. With that, my responses to the above:

1. The 5-week TFA Institute completed the summer before a corps member's first year of teaching is quite literally, a crash course, aka teacher boot-camp. Did I feel that I was prepared to teach by the end of the summer? Not really. But I do know that TFA is constantly reflecting and revising their materials to improve the summer training. This year they will include separate science pedagogy instruction, which was no where to be found when I completed my training in summer of 2002. In addition, I was teaching in a school with other first year teachers, some of whom were part of an alternative certification cohort, some who had formal teacher training in college. I can say, hands down, myself and the other TFA teachers in my school performed as well, if not better, in improving student achievement than these other teachers. And I believe this to be a major success of TFA's model.
2. I know, I know, I'm no longer teaching, therefore, what good am I doing for the education system? My experience in the corps drastically changed my outlook on my career path. I always intended to be an academic research scientist. Now I realize that teaching and education reform also must be part of my vocation. I see myself working both at the university level and the political level (i.e. volunteering, grant writing, policy making) to make change. Many, many other of my fellow corps members are still teaching. And the others are making an impact in fields like medicine, law, and business. The TFA model of building a movement of leaders in all fields that recognize the great need to overcome educational inequity in the US in our lifetime is working. I am proof of that.
3. As far as whether Teach for America can be a solution to the crises that our education system faces, I don't think it's the silver bullet. However, I'm not sure what else has been proposed that is working. This is where disparaging comments from the academics in education really start to bug me. If they have the answer to education reform, what or where is it? Especially in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) how many teachers are the schools of Ed producing and sending to the schools of highest need? As a chemistry teacher in Baltimore I know that many of my students had other science and math teachers with no training in the subject mater (physics, upper level mathematics) they were teaching! Until the schools of Education can produce the necessary numbers of highly qualified science and math teachers, programs like Teach for America, which heavily recruit top science and math undergraduates to apply, are the only real solution to the problem. Programs like UTeach at University of Texas and others, which were featured in Science magazine recently, are a start, but UTeach is a program run outside the traditional education academies.

In the end, I believe that those in the academy must embrace alternative solutions and work with them towards a common goal. It is very easy to discuss limitations of a novel model over the traditional one. Unfortunately, the traditional model has yet to stem the tide of the problem, especially as our education system falls farther and father behind in science and mathematics.

I prefer "Recovering Heterosexual"

In celebration of St. Louis PrideFest this weekend, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the homosexual agenda... well, actually my homosexual agenda. No, no, not my secret plot to turn Hailey Duff into a dyke- just my thoughts about me being queer and society. Or as a friend recently described hers, "my brief history of Gay!" When I came out in college at 19, it didn't seem to shock anyone, except me. Maybe it was because I went away to a liberal women's college in the Northeast. Or maybe it was because I could keep score at a baseball game and knew how to shotgun a beer. Regardless, it seemed that everyone else realized that my high school obsession with Molly Ringwald was not because of her acting abilities. After my "well, duh! that makes sense" moment, I think coming out was the easy part. What was difficult was figuring out all the other stuff that comes along with it.

Having "the gay" at Bryn Mawr wasn't really news. In fact, the thing that I always struggled with and still do to some extent, was not having enough of the gay. There is a very delicate balance between avoiding the usual stereotypes (i.e. flannel, mullets, women's sports, Indigo Girls concerts) and having enough identifiers to be recognized by others as a lesbian (i.e. flannel, mullets, women's sports, Indigo Girls concerts.) I always worried about "passing" as straight- something about heterosexuality being everyone's default orientation unless you meet one of the qualifiers listed above really irks me. After moving the St. Louis from the East Coast, one of the first three sentences out of my mouth would usually proclaim my "gayness!" Talk about over-compensation...

Maybe this is changing as queers in ours and younger generations seek to avoid labels and exist as individuals- gay, straight, or whatever. With articles in Time proclaiming the quiet gay revolution I wonder where we will end up in 20 years. What is the outcome of this "revolution?" Will the labels still exist? Will there still be a default orientation or will we simple just be able to live our lives?

tennesseein' is tennebelievin'

my home state made national news this weekend. it would be nice if I could say that researchers at Vanderbilt or St. Jude's have found a cure for leukemia, or that Al Gore announced from his home in Carthage that he will seek the Democratic nomination in 2008. unfortunately, the headline scrolling past at the bottom of CNN said that 6 kids, the oldest being 22, were killed at an exhibition drag race in Selmer. needless to say, it's a tragedy for all those involved.

the thing that gets me is that again we have an event that allows the media to perpetuate the idea that Tennessee is this backwater locale where folks line up in their John Deere hats and Daisy Dukes to be plowed over by out-of-control hot rods. I guess it's not surprising, given our history. I like where I grew up, but sometimes I wish that my state did a bit more to make me proud to hail from there.

Take Massachusetts for example. The news last week of the defeat of an amendment to ban same-sex marriage by the state legislature (in the only state in the union to allow them) was something that all residents of MA should celebrate. This means that equal rights for gays and lesbians and their families will continue to be legal in MA till at least 2012. Lots of recaps and other news regarding Thursday's historic vote can be found here. If you're a resident of Massachusetts, go have yourself a drink on me.

eviscerate your memory

I recently returned from my 5 year college reunion in PA. Bryn Mawr, my alma mater, was simply that in every sense of the Latin translation... a nourishing mother. I spent most of the weekend surrounded by old friends and making new ones. But most of all, reunion for me was about becoming connected again with a place that holds many pieces of my self. They whispered to me across the campus, scratchy answering machine messages that never seem to sound like how you thought they would when you recorded them. How a place can be wrapped up in so many different versions of the same person- all the old best versions of me infused in the trees and glass and stone. Being back made me wonder if I am still affected by the events in my life now as I was during my 4 years there. Do you ever stop becoming the person that you will one day be? I hope that writing more will give me time to reflect instead of just passing through my daily routine. It has become too easy to read others words and not remember to stop and look around once and a while, to leave behind former selves and push myself again.