"Hi. We're from the modern world. Baby Gap has set-up a sewing trailer down the road and we'd be happy to pay you four dollars a year to start stitching Elmo hoodies. Bring your kids! They'll love the 16-hour days. Also, this land your family has been living on for 10,000 years? Now, it's owned by Citigroup and you'll need to start paying $1,200/month in rent. Welcome to planet earth, savages."
"Oh. And have you heard the good news about Jesus of Nazareth?"

Who needs science anyway?

So the other day at work an instructor read me some research that said elementary and middle school aged kids get about 45 minutes of science education compared to 750 minutes of reading/literacy-based instruction over the course of a year, on average in the US. I was pretty shocked, so I asked all of my students today how often they have science class. Of the six 6th grade classes I surveyed they all said one class, once a month, but sometimes it gets bumped. One class said it had been bumped the past four months.

I just wish science was made more interesting. Everyone has an innate curiosity about how the world works but it sure gets made bland in school. I never enjoyed reading about it or saw its huge importance until I was out of school. Well now I'm going to be picking out science books everyday for the kiddies. I had avoided them because I just sort of transferred my experience of hating science in school on them and thought they'd find all out science books boring. But today we started reading about space and they asked so many spontaneous questions and showed so much genuine curiosity that I realized I was wrong.

‎"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Martin Luther King, Jr.

That Old Meyers-Briggs Nonsense

So, this journal is about to take a turn to the decidedly less personal, but before it does...

I tested as an INTP. Reads with slightly less vagueness than an astrological sign description.

The Thinker

As an INTP, your primary mode of living is focused internally, where you deal with things rationally and logically. Your secondary mode is external, where you take things in primarily via your intuition.

INTPs do not like to lead or control people. They're very tolerant and flexible in most situations, unless one of their firmly held beliefs has been violated or challenged, in which case they may take a very rigid stance. The INTP is likely to be very shy when it comes to meeting new people. On the other hand, the INTP is very self-confident and gregarious around people they know well, or when discussing theories which they fully understand. 

The INTP is usually very independent, unconventional, and original. They are not likely to place much value on traditional goals such as popularity and security. They usually have complex characters, and may tend to be restless and temperamental. They are strongly ingenious, and have unconventional thought patterns which allows them to analyze ideas in new ways. Consequently, a lot of scientific breakthroughs in the world have been made by the INTP.

INTPs value knowledge above all else. Their minds are constantly working to generate new theories, or to prove or disprove existing theories. They approach problems and theories with enthusiasm and skepticism, ignoring existing rules and opinions and defining their own approach to the resolution. They seek patterns and logical explanations for anything that interests them. They're usually extremely bright, and able to be objectively critical in their analysis. They love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. They love to discuss these concepts with others. They may seem "dreamy" and distant to others, because they spend a lot of time inside their minds musing over theories. They hate to work on routine things - they would much prefer to build complex theoretical solutions, and leave the implementation of the system to others. They are intensely interested in theory, and will put forth tremendous amounts of time and energy into finding a solution to a problem with has piqued their interest. 

The INTP has no understanding or value for decisions made on the basis of personal subjectivity or feelings. They strive constantly to achieve logical conclusions to problems, and don't understand the importance or relevance of applying subjective emotional considerations to decisions. For this reason, INTPs are usually not in-tune with how people are feeling, and are not naturally well-equiped to meet the emotional needs of others. 

 If the INTP has not developed their Sensing side sufficiently, they may become unaware of their environment, and exhibit weakness in performing maintenance-type tasks, such as bill-paying and dressing appropriately. 

The INTP is at his best when he can work on his theories independently. When given an environment which supports his creative genius and possible eccentricity, the INTP can accomplish truly remarkable things. These are the pioneers of new thoughts in our society.

http://www.personalitypage.com/INTP.html

A Story of the Buried Life

I live in a town that has made monuments of an author famous for a book titled You Can't Go Home Again. His first book Look Homeward, Angel (A Story of the Buried Life) depicted local residents in such a way through its barely attempted fictionalization, that from his new adopted home of Baltimore, he truly couldn't come back, and received death threats stating as much.

I've had many homes, and at one point or another wanted to return to them all, only to find I couldn't. I, like Wolfe, was born in Western NC. Only I was born into my parent's (who were both from large cities) rural living-off-the-land utopian experiment, that after 10 years ended in a dissolved marriage when I was four. From there my mother and I lived in rural Scottsville, Virginia (famous for a yoga compound and a woman who claimed* to be the escaped Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia). Then to the historical but much more metropolitan town (in part due to UVA founded by Thomas Jefferson, or as the residents called him, TJ) of Charlottesville, VA about an hour away, with excellent schools and a real sense of community. Then we moved, most jarringly, to Baltimore City. There I had the experience of being a racial minority in a city public school that hadn't the resources to provide textbooks to students that hadn't the money to afford their own. From there it was to suburban Baltimore County and its mostly white schools, and then to one of the areas private schools for the "financially elite" on a scholarship.

I've missed them all in at least some slight way. Where does someone go when their foundation is a pastiche of elements that can't be made sense of by the person who lived it, let alone summed up tidily in a 10 minute "Hi, how are you, where are you from" meet and greet? It becomes something unspeakable and isolating. The things I miss of each place are, in the case of the shreds of shared experiences with people, lost to time. But in many cases it's something geographical about the place itself.

For the year in rural Virginia it was:
-The small abandoned cemetery so old there were only worn away headstones above sunken-in soft earth, the bodies once buried there long decomposed. Just two pillars of an erstwhile church and some faint tracks of a long abandoned road leading there marked the site in the forest.
-Large rounded stones in a ground cover of turkey foot that I used to play on and hop between, pretending they were islands.
-The birds at dusk I've never heard since: whippoorwill, bobwhite, grouse.
-My grandparent's home, but since they are gone so too is its significance.

None of the places were, geographically speaking, terribly far apart. But inner city Baltimore is, experientially, about as far as you can get from the rural south several hours away, or the school for the privileged in Baltimore County a mere 20 minutes away. (I'll never forget the feeling when the young girl I tutored for my community service project looked up at me and said "this is your school?" as we sat outside on the private school's campus surrounded by fields and rolling hills. The students we had tutored had been invited for an end of year picnic. I gave her my phone number and she used to call me at home frequently, saying nothing, but I would stay on the line with her and little by little she revealed bits of her life. Like for instance, that she had no room and no bed but slept on the floor of her family's living room with her brothers and sisters.) Similarly, someone can live all over the world and experience roughly the same culture if they stay in the bubble of economic class and race.

Home is never quite the same once you have left. As someone with no siblings or much family it would probably make sense to try to create a home of my own through family. Yet in my typical rebellious fashion, I don't want to. I don't want to sound like something my parents would have said back in the much maligned 70's, but if people broadened their definition of family to include more than their own blood, the world might be a better place. And I guess that's my ultimate goal, to feel at home in the larger world.



So I truly can't go home again either. In a way I'm glad I can't even try. My task today was digging out of the snow, and unearthing a bit of buried life.

*and was widely believed, even to the point a History teacher in that Baltimore private school mentioned her during our Russian History unit.

It's takes a village

It may not be how Hillary intended it, but I see a lot of value in this phrase.

Our focus on every person having their OWN everything, including children, means that kids from difficult homes are just plain out of luck and largely left to fend for themselves. In the village model - a kid may have been unlucky in the parent department, but there's a network of other people there to fall back on -all of whom help out in the rearing, and therefore a missing or unengaged parent isn't the blow it is when that's all a child's got.

There are over two billion kids already alive. There are so many in just one square city mile that need someone - yet so few adults with the time or willingness to give to them. When people have their own kids the time and interest to invest in outside, larger world issues becomes even less. For a child on the outside of one, the nuclear family model can look very selfish and exclusive, the concept of "family" very narrow. Research has shown that the ONE way to overcome a difficult home life for children from a troubled background is by the involvement of even one consistent, engaged adult presence. It doesn't have to be a family member, it just has to be someone there. For the long term.