12.16.2010

Adopting a family "in need"

I take zumba (aerobic dancing) at a church in Centerville, which is taught by this very energetic and spiritual woman whom I really admire. My ears perked up today when she began talking about how our zumba class (probably at least fifty women from around the area) should think about "adopting a family" for the holiday season--aka buying them gifts they couldn't afford themselves.

It sounded like a great idea, and she'd even put the gift requests on little tags at the front of the room. I have fond memories of a similar thing we did in high school. One year I gave a little girl a journal, since in her note she said she wanted to write. That request really touched me, so I was eager to see what my family could do to help this year.

Imagine my surprise when I started reading the tags themselves.

"$50 giftcard to China Cottage"

"Nintendo DS games"

"iPod case"

etc.

I understand that many families in our area have been hit hard by the recession, and perhaps one or even both parents have lost their jobs. I'm not sure how families are chosen to be beneficiaries of this type of program, but I don't think a family that requests A SPECIFIC DOLLAR AMOUNT on their gift cards should really qualify. If one of the kids wants Nintendo DS games, that means he already has a Nintendo DS--not the cheapest of toys.

It makes me wonder what we qualify as "need". Of course, I'm equally guilty of material desires, and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with wanting material things, but there has to be a limit. The point of the "adopt a family" program is to make up for a deficiency and bring Christmas to a home in which it would otherwise not exist. But a parent who can afford to buy their child a DS and has the audacity to request a fifty dollar gift-card from a total stranger doesn't qualify, at least in my opinion. I wonder if that family reads the news and sees the other families around the world whose suffering is ten times greater than theirs.

12.15.2010

I eat, therefore I am.

There is something strange about our household. At least once a day, the Food Network is on, with its cheerful images of food that the viewer can neither taste nor smell--and you would think that no one would watch such shows, since it's essentially like putting an orchestra of well-dressed musicians on a screen, then pressing the mute button.

So why do I love the Food Network? I can't really cook, and I don't even attempt baking. The food on the show is very different from what I eat at home--I watch specials on southern-style barbecue and Italian food while eating my rice.

I thought maybe it was the comfort of watching experts and their deft handling of a craft that is still a world away from me--but if that were the case, then I'd get a huge kick out of watching golf. And it can't quite be the personalities that draw me in every time, since I find Paula Deen slightly horrifying, Bobby Flay annoying, and Sandra Lee the devil herself.

I will semi-homemake your soul into submission.

Why does anyone watch the Food Network? Is watching people make a cake really that interesting? (yes, but why?) Do you really glean useful tips and recipes from the shows? If I want to make anything, I always end up going to the website for the recipe...but in that case, why not just have the website without the tv? Writing about this is making me want to watch Iron Chef America.

For that matter, why have I started reading Slashfood, the blog about food trends? I can't even really call myself a foodie, since I'm limited by a student's budget even in a foodie paradise like Chicago. I'm genuinely puzzled by this. Maybe I'm masochistic, making myself drool over food that I'll probably never eat.

Either way, I hope I come out of this whole phase (if it is a phase, which I'm starting to doubt) a better cook. What do you think? I wonder if other people have truly inexplicable interests.

12.14.2010

Five Things to Love Today



1. Cute kids and a father's love for them--check out this cool article that my friend Belinda sent me:
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/a-father-who-creatively

2. Christmas desserts.


3. Starbucks' winter- themed drinks! Those red cups always bring a smile to my face.

4. The always-fabulous dresses from Modcloth.com and all the time in world to peruse them :)



5. The Black Swan. The words "Natalie Portman" and "erotic ballet thriller" are almost always a good combo.


As a side note, my boyfriend is officially halfway across the world right now and I miss him terribly. 
However, I'm cheered by the fact that tomorrow I will make my first foray into the world of Christmas craft-making. It'll probably turn out as well as my nutella cake did...oh boy.
sigh.



You know you're getting old when you start getting this sentimental.

It’s so strange for me to think of myself as being almost twenty. At the end of this short year, I will have crossed the boundary into the latter half of my undergraduate career. (Let’s not think about how many years of schooling I’ll have after that…)

I’m sure many of you are going through similar thought processes. This year when I came home for Thanksgiving, all but a handful of my friends were in college already. I’m thinking specifically of the big Chinese Thanksgiving gathering that always marks the beginning of the holiday season for me—the boys who seem like my older brothers and especially the girls I love as my sisters. When did we all get so old? I’ll always think of this motley crew as forever in high school, forever taking endless piano lessons and playing tennis and taking art and whatever the hell we did to fill those Ohio days. Now, we’re spread all over the country, owning our own businesses, getting married—but it comforts me to know that we’ll always have our time together, and we regroup it’s almost as if nothing has changed.

The same goes for my friends from high school. In many ways, we have grown apart. Instead of spending eight hours a day together, we spend maybe fifteen hours a year in each other’s company, which makes the time we have together all the more precious. We’re not in the same classes, and increasingly, we don’t interact with the same people. All of this is frightening, but at the same time, comforting—because I can spend almost an entire year away from these people and yet still go to their houses and feel home again. We can still while away the long hours of a snowy Ohio evening just talking.

I told myself that I wouldn’t use this to ramble endlessly about myself, which is the blogger’s tired, clichéd trap, but I just had to say something about the feeling of love that overwhelmed me tonight. I wonder if people ever know how much they mean to others? As I sit at home watching the silence settle over my neighborhood, I feel so grateful for all that I have—all the wonderful people who make up my life and all the wonderful people who have yet to enter it. 

12.12.2010

A lesson.

I recently had an interesting conversation with my boss at Kumon, a math and reading tutoring center that in my native Ohio is a hotbed of overachieving Indian and Asian kids. However, here in Chicago, the second-story suite at 55th and Lake Park paints a very different picture.

You can feel the desperation in the waiting room. Parents whose children are in seventh grade and can’t do addition yet flip aimlessly through the magazines that my boss leaves out there randomly (we boast a copy of Skymall from 2000…). These are not the parents who form our friend circle in Dayton. They range from high school dropouts to high-powered lawyers, all crammed in this airless room that smells of our janitor’s unwashed hair, craning their necks to see what I’m teaching their children. They need this center, and this center needs them—my boss admitted that he loses about half of his students every year at December (though it’s yet to happen this year), perhaps because parents can’t keep up with the tuition (around $100 per subject per month). Then again, what choice do they have now?

It was Sunday, and I was sitting in front of the center’s tired Toshiba laptop, typing in test scores because my boss still insists on using paper records instead of cutting out that middle step. I don’t complain. Actually I do, endlessly, but never to his face.

While browsing his emails for him, I noticed that one of his Chrome tabs was open to the recently published article on Shanghai’s PISA scores. As some of you may know, China recently entered the international standardized-testing ring. The New York Times basically shit its pants over how high the Shanghai test scores were—although why that should be surprising, I have no idea. I mean, what are Asian kids known for, besides being whizzes at math and piano? I may be the only known exception on Earth.

Anyway, my boss and I got into a discussion of the current educational system in America, which I’ve become fascinated with ever since I started working here. I mean, we’re tutoring this woman who’s going to take the Illinois teaching exam for the third time, and she can’t answer the question:

“What percent of 36 is 30?”

(Incidentally, an English major at UChicago told me laughingly that she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to do that, which…didn’t quite make me laugh.)

America currently ranks around 30th in the world in reading and math, and yet some of my peers don’t see much reason to be very concerned. People crow about American innovation, without realizing that people down the street from them have children who are thirteen and can’t yet read a picture book. What can we do? We read about all the latest gimmicks, school districts complaining that they can’t teach because they don’t have the latest computer system. But I think it goes deeper than that.

We need a change in cultural perspective before anything else. There are many things wrong with the Chinese system, and I’ll be the first to admit it, but the one lesson that Americans should take from this might be the Chinese “culture of education”, as the Times put it. China has long placed emphasis on filial duty and respect for elders, so that children think of teachers as people who actually have something to teach them. There’s no complaining about students being “overworked” or “pressured” just because they have two quizzes in one day—successful students in China recognize that they are just that: students. Education is the focus, and as a result, Chinese students are on the rise in the world. Although American universities are still on top and still attract the highest caliber of students from around the world, the day is coming when other nations will have the resources to challenge American universities. Already, we see an increased number of international students leaving America after school to return to their native countries, taking their new skills back with them.
Of course, respect for teachers goes hand in hand with all of this. The woman who can’t figure percents is admirable for wanting to go into the teaching, but that doesn’t mean she should be allowed to. In all likelihood, she will eventually pass the test—with tutors holding her hand every step of the way. 

What’s going to happen when she faces a classroom of seventh graders, most of whom do math at the 4th grade level?

We need to make the teaching profession what it ought to be: a respected calling, with pay that corresponds to the hard work good teachers put in. It’s almost criminal that people who get up at 5 in the morning every day to shape America’s future barely make enough to be considered middle class. Of course, I may be biased, being the daughter of two professors. But I’ve seen and experienced firsthand what a difference good teachers can make, and how far we can be set back by mediocre ones.

My boss asked me whether I think what made America great still lingers in its soil and its people. In his opinion, if we can reach back to our roots, we can remain on top forever, and I agree. But if we don’t adjust soon, we lose that chance. So what exactly was it that made this country the beautiful place it is today? How can we fight the double-edged sword of complacent arrogance and helplessness in the face of our educational problems? We owe it to ourselves to think this over.

Post the first.

testing testing 123.
What self-respecting writer can exist without a self-absorbed blog?