just kidding

www.estherxyu.wordpress.com

Relocation!

I've decided to move my blog to a tumblr version. Tumblr just has such an easy platform to use and I'm already on there 24/7 anyway...so stay tuned!

I'll be on hiatus through the first week of June, but I plan to start blogging with a vengeance once the summer is truly ahead of me.

Good luck with finals!

My So-Called Education?

Finals are fast approaching, and that means one thing: more procrastination, more Netflix, and more internet surfing. Just kidding, Mom.

While doing so, I did come across this article, which rehashes an idea that has been floating around the ideosphere for a while: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1

First of all, a snarkier title there could not be. My “so-called education”? NYtimes, you don’t know my life.

It’s interesting to think about this from an English major’s point of view, however. Whenever I’ve been told that my major isn’t “real”, whatever that means, the critic usually points to the fact that my classwork isn’t quantifiable. I can’t hold up x number of problem sets and say, “Look, I’m a big girl now!” Instead all I have are papers that most people don’t necessarily find interesting (unless they really care about The Canterbury Tales, I guess, or maybe whether anthropomorphism can ever be anything but anthropocentric. Did I lose you?)

My major requirements are, to many people, disconcertingly vague (take at least one class focused on British literature and one class centered on the study of poetry, etc.) while math and science majors have reassuring sequences. In other majors, there is a way of definitely knowing whether you are “better” than someone else. Answers are usually right or wrong (NOT, for example, “a good start but perhaps if you delved deeper into ways in which Chaucer problematizes the ethos of pure violence, you might arrive at a clearer analysis…”). You can turn to someone and say, “I’m in Math 203”, which is by most standards definitively higher and harder than Math 202. Whereas someone in “Chinese Literature of the 20^th Century” can’t say they’ve advanced beyond someone in “Reading and Roadtripping”

The NYtimes article raises the possibility that students use their four (more or less) precious undergrad years just generally dicking around and not learning anything. The assertion that there are people who only spend 12 hours on schoolwork a week is, I’m sure, shocking to us UChicago students who live in the Reg. People can take courses with less than 40 pages of reading a week?

Some of us are fortunate enough to go to colleges that still prize academics over fancy amenities. I, for example, read almost 300 pages a week and live in a building with rats and no air-conditioning. I’m sure many of my friends would agree that at least here at the U of C, there’s no lack of academic rigor. Yet.

However, the article does raise some pertinent questions, even for our hallowed institution. The point about teacher evaluations is, for example, quite relevant. A friend of mine has raged more than once about the flaws in the teacher evaluation system, which includes questions designed to steer students towards easier classes with less work. Practically speaking, most students do pay attention to those qualifications—but this system still, as NYtimes puts it, creates “incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades”.

The core at this University (and at other universities) raises other concerns. I have certainly felt like my time was being wasted as I sat in a physical sciences class, along with about a hundred other students, learning that water comes in three phases. (No joke, this information was actually presented as part of a lecture.) Is it really necessary to force students to take both humanities and social sciences, civilization studies, biology, and physical sciences? I understand the argument that familiarity with some thinkers (Marx, Smith, Foucault, etc.) is considered necessary to get on as an intellectual in this world. But is Core Biology really going to be useful to an English major? Or an Economics major, for that matter? Core classes do not explore the depth necessary to really know a subject, and they rarely cover ground that is truly new and exciting. Instead, they skim the surface of an impossibly broad topic, forcing students to do a lot of busy-work in exchange for little real learning. And yes, even non-writing-based majors should know how to craft a well-argued paper, but does that really require seven quarters of humanities, social sciences, and civ? It seems that time could be better spent learning more relevant information, or taking more focused classes.

What do you think? Are you actually learning anything at college? (Hopefully you’re learning something…)

On Top of the World

                One of my favorite classes last year was Japanese Theater, which covered, obviously, forms of Japanese theater. But it also led us down diverse paths of thought to consider what can be related to the study of theater. Societal customs, taboo love, the movement of money, the trajectory of history—how all of these fit together and weave an undercurrent for stories like Dojoji and Kurozuka.

                I wrote a paper for this class on reading different styles of movement, which I recently dug up again. After discussing the different meanings attached to styles of dance in Japan, I wrote:

“This idea still holds true today, even in much of modern American society. In a way, American society, like other societies around the world, has fetishized certain qualities of movement—giving the movement more significance than it holds in itself. A prominent example can be found in the practice of women walking in high heels. In an interview situation for a high-paid corporate job, a well-dressed woman walking gracefully in high heels will immediately make a better impression than another woman wearing loafers or sneakers. Although wearing sneakers does not signify anything about the second woman’s job capabilities, the interviewer will subconsciously infer information about the second woman from her footwear. The first woman will come across a certain way simply because of her movement, and the accoutrement she has chosen to accentuate that movement. High heels carry certain connotations—desirability, confidence, wealth—and being able to navigate them automatically conveys a clear message to an interviewer, even though the movement does not reveal information that is directly linked to the first woman’s job qualifications. Like the Japanese prostitute or the merchant’s daughter, the woman in high heels has internalized the idea that a certain movement will carry a particular impression along with it.

Thus, we can see that the idea of bodily knowledge is not limited to the dancer’s or mover’s own experience. Rather, we can think of every decision regarding movement—what shoes we wear, what dances we choose to study—as a conscious performative act, since all decisions about movement are linked to a particular set of impressions in our viewer’s mind. Movement is action, and actions make up life. Thus viewers often extrapolate a meaning from movement that is then applied to an understanding of an individual’s life, whether that extrapolation is correct or not.”

I don’t know why I suddenly thought of this paper. Maybe it was because I was waiting in line for a coffee and saw a rare sight on the UChicago campus: a young woman wearing a chic raspberry trench over a black dress with a pair of sky-high, absolutely beautiful heels. I immediately, and perhaps shallowly, admired her a little more and couldn’t help wondering where she was going, or where she had come from. It’s particularly relevant to me because I’m still confined to this clunky medical boot, and though I longingly peruse the espadrille section of Nine West, I know it will be a while before I feel perfectly, confidently myself again.

Broken.

I started a blog post while riding in the car from Florida back to Kevin's home in Virginia. Then, I was still caught in a state of limbo. My foot was propped up against the dashboard, wrapped in a flimsy, bright yellow layer of athletic wrap that seemed to do absolutely nothing. I had a bottle of very inadequate pain medicine. I had only slept an hour the previous night, lying awake in pain and unable to reach the advil.

Now, I miss that painful car ride. At least, while gritting my teeth in pain and staring out at the endless stretch of I-95, I had something to hold on to. I told myself (and Kevin told me) that it was probably nothing, despite the pain, only a little turn of the ankle or a sprain. Once I reached the Urgent Care in Virginia, they would put something on it. A better wrap. Hey, I told myself, you might be walking again with a splint, limping comically, that's the worst that could happen, and then we'll all go to Outback Steakhouse and have a good laugh about this.

I must have been delirious. And when the doctor came to tell me that it was just beginning, that I had definitely broken two bones and would not walk (let alone dance) for at least another month and a half, I broke down into tears. All those hours for RBIM, all that money raised for Dance Marathon. (I am still holding out hope that I'll be able to do Dance Marathon). The pain as the nurse took my x-ray.

"It's the right foot?"
"yeah, the right foot"
"You sure? I thought it was the left. This paper says it's the left."
My right foot was swollen to twice the size of my left and wrapped in a bright yellow bandage. It was the right foot, and no mistake.

It's so strange to only have the use of one foot. I have to carefully reconsider every move now, especially because I've never sprained or broken anything, not even in my years of dancing en pointe, and I have never used crutches. Polished hardwood stairs are my enemy. I took so many things for granted, as I realized at our first stop for gas on the way back. For the first time in twenty years, I had to use my hand to push down the damp, spotted flush lever, rather than effortlessly flicking up one pointed foot and avoiding the rampant germs.  Now everything, from sitting down to getting something out of my own suitcase, is a long journey and an arduous one.

When I first fell, I was trying to skim-board.

You get the idea.

 We were in Daytona Beach with a friend, and it looked easy enough. The idea was to drop the board while running so that it would glide along the shallow layer of water near the shore, then hop on and effortlessly slice through the water. When I dropped the board and attempted to jump onto it, my left foot made it. My right foot didn't. Instead, it caught underneath the board. While the board kept moving forward, so did my body, but my right foot was now caught underneath me as I fell, and my arch bent nearly in half before it twisted out from under me and I lay sprawled in the sand with a mouthful of spray.

It probably would have taken me over an hour to hop to our fourth floor hotel room.
That's why I realize that I have been blessed throughout this, in a way. I have the most loving boyfriend in the world, who has willingly carried me in his arms through gas stations, restaurants, hotel lobbies, and hospitals, even when he himself was exhausted. Without him, I would be completely lost.

More mobile times in Jamaica.

Thank you for all your good wishes! My next step is to see an orthopedic surgeon, since the urgent care doctor wasn't a specialist and couldn't really tell me anything definitive. It will be tough getting around, especially during hectic first week, so if you see me struggling around on campus, don't laugh :)

Model behavior.

Well, it’s the end of another quarter.

One of the most wonderful things about being home (besides seeing my family and eating home-cooked food and sleeping in a giant white wonderland of a bed, of course) is walking barefoot on a clean carpet. There are so many small pleasures that I didn’t even consider when I was living here, being barefoot foremost among them. It’s a sign that I’ve really let my guard down, this traipsing barefoot all over my Mom’s neatly vacuumed floors. Being barefoot is a sign of trust, of that home-ness I’ve been missing. Is that silly?

It's been a busy, busy quarter, what with dance, work, classes, Theta stuff, Ann Taylor, and MODA. I'm sure some of you are wondering about that outfit....you know the one. (In fact, I had coffee with a good friend back home and the first thing she asked me was, "Can you just explain to me what was going on there?!")

In case you haven't seen it, let me burn it into your retinas.

werk.

That look of embarrassment and pain on my face is compounded by the fact that I am trying to keep the giant yogurt carton on my head from sliding off and falling down my back. The whole get-up went something like this:

yogurt carton tied to my head

bedsheet on top

red paint

red barbed wire

A lot of people had something to say about this outfit, which I think I can safely conjecture was the most "out-there" look on the runway. My designer, a very lovable and adorable person, explained it to me as she was tying me into it about an hour before the show. (Honestly, had I known what I would be wearing far enough in advance...I'm not sure I would have had the guts to go out there on a runway in front of my peers and members of the Chicago fashion industry). She said she was going for a wedding dress, which was sexy because it didn't reveal the wearer's curves. She warned me that the sexiness would all have to come from my facial expression.

Well...I tried, really I did, but the people shouting my name as I walked, coupled with extreme discomfort of the heavy sheet dragging down the yogurt cup tied to my head...it was a trial, let me assure you. Looking sexy was the furthest thing from my mind. 

To top it off, the dress came untied during the second walk around the runway and flapped open, exposing my legs and butt to the entire audience. And since my hands were basically bound to my sides with barbed wire, it was quite a challenge to gather the sheet closed.

Of course, as I was leaving the runway and going back to the backstage area, a random old janitor leered, "Yer thing is coming undone there..."

Yeah, thanks.

If you're wondering, my designer said she was inspired by this Yves Saint Laurent dress: (not the KKK or a bloody tampon, as many suggested)

The knitwork on this is amazing. And YSL can do stuff like this, because they're YSL. But a bedsheet? Not quite on the same level.

All in all, I have to say, it was a very interesting experience. I am not daunted by MODA, and I think I'll try for their Spring show. At least my designer had some sort of vision...something unique. Right? Right.

In other modeling news, you can vote for me on Ann Taylor's nationwide student modeling call. 

:)

I think this is one of the worse I took. But...what do I know.

Happy Spring Break, everyone!

Snowpocalypse

Just a little update from the Windy City.

The University of Chicago cancelled classes due to snow for the first time since 1967, apparently. However, they waited until 2am this morning to do it...after sending out an email last evening saying, "Please don't leave whatever building you're in." At that point, however, they still expected us to go to class the next morning. I sense a bit of a disconnect.

The Hyde Park area is almost eerily quiet, as people walk down the middle of 55th street and not a single moving car is in sight. I saw a woman on skis serenely making her way down the street...took a picture with the handy waterproof camera I brought to document our house's game of snow-football, but unfortunately I won't be able to make it to CVS to get those pictures developed in time.

In the meantime, here is a handy approximation of our current situation:

Last night, we were privileged to be the epicenter of a rare occurrence: THUNDERSNOW. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow

It was, as you may have guessed, AWESOME.

Anyway, I will be spending this rare snow day doing what UChicago students do: studying for a physci midterm, writing a sosc paper, and doing hours of reading. Should have gone to school in Cali. 

National Brands

The Wall Street Journal recently featured an interesting article about a Peruvian man's lonely campaign to change the Peruvian national anthem, which starts with such uplifting, pride-inspiring lyrics as:

"For a long time, the oppressed Peruvian dragged the ominous chain."

:(

The article talked about how other nations had also considered (and mostly rejected) changes to their national anthems, in an era marked by consciousness of "national branding".

The phrase struck me as quite strange, especially since it was casually thrown into the conversation as if it represented a part of daily global conversation.

When I think of national brands, I tend to think of actual brands. After traveling to China, for example, I realized that there is no better ambassador for a positive American image abroad than the clean, shining interior of a convenient and delicious McDonald's.

Oh hey there.

Is a national anthem really part of a country's overall image? Forgive me if this is merely ignorance, but no anthems really come to mind when I think of other countries...ask me to hum a few bars of Britain, France, Russia, or even China's national anthem, and I don't think I could do it. And we haven't even gotten to lyrics yet.

I suppose, however, that anthems were originally intended to represent the country, at least to its own citizens. America's anthem calls to mind glory in war, honoring the flag, lovely fireworks arching over a twinkly star-filled sky...all clearly very "American" facets of our culture. So is this focus on national anthems, and the desire to change them to reflect changing times (such as the removal of God from Russia's national anthem, or expunging a cry to crush the 'rebel Scots' in Britain's), a relevant reflection of a national identity crisis? Since almost all of the countries features in the article voted overwhelmingly to keep their national anthems the same, I guess that might mean that national identity is as strong as ever. But if anthems are no longer heralds of national identity, then what, if anything, really makes up the "national brand"? 

If such a thing exists. 

You can find the original article here: 

"Oh, Say, Can You See New Lyrics For This Anthem?"

Back to the Grind

Whenever I'm in Chicago, I always end up thinking about one thing:
money.

I came back on the second and almost immediately headed over to Kumon, which was still littered with the remains of a holiday party that occurred on the 24th of December....luckily, my boss conscripted his daughter into the cleanup, so I could concentrate on the always life-affirming work of making copies. Which I proceeded to do for three hours. I think that everyone who works at Kumon might, at some point in their life, become a Marxist.

I've really started to view money in a different light. Instead of swinging by Forever21 and snatching up the first ten-dollar top I see, I have to stop and think. Ten dollars is an hour of my time. It's really throwing a wrench into my internet shopping habit, for one thing.

On a related note, my Physical Sciences class today discussed the following topic:
"Weather...sometimes we can predict and sometimes we can't, and when it's bad, it costs people money."
As I was sitting there, watching my friend's eyes glaze over, I checked facebook for the third time and thought about how this hour and twenty minute session was costing my family hundreds of dollars. In exchange for learning next to nothing, I was in essence using up tens of hours of my own labor-time. Then I cried tears of gratitude that I don't have to fully finance my own education. I really admire those who see the value of education clearly enough to work for it.

On an unrelated note, I hope everyone had a great holiday! I'm already planning Spring Break.

Yum.

Black Swan.

Tangled.

Go see them now.

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.

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.

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. 

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 55^th 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 30^th 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 4^th 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?