I'm making an exception. The woman with whom I built a pretty damn good if ultimately confused life for a quarter century drew down her days today working in the school district library system. As in many other school districts, librarians were long since replaced with "media techs", a lower-paid classification. Then the media tech positions were eliminated, libraries to be run next year by a small cycling population of something like "data entry clerks", an even lower paid classification whose qualification is a certain typing speed. It makes no sense but there it is.
With an ever-changing population of four hundred or so five to eleven year old children to have library time with, many of them without functional parents or English language skills, most of them on welfare, all of them full of the juice and spice and energy of rapidly growing youth, she had her hands full every day. She made a lot of differences, turning behavioral problems into helpers, TV-addicts into readers, and children without guidance into kids who had at least one solid and positive adult influence in their lives. Kids wave to her and say "Hi Mrs T!" all over town, and earlier students now graduating high school come by once in awhile just to say hi.
For all the problems she had, we had, I had, I was always enormously proud of her talent and hard work and of the good she was doing and I said so, too. Even when she was denigrating her own lowly pay, I was always sure to remind her that what she does is far more important than the detailed semi-technical and semi-bureaucratic nonsense I get paid so much more to do. Well, now she's unemployed.
Email today cracked my heart open:
All the classes in all grades made me a going away yearbook. It’s as thick as the Sacramento telephone book. One of the students presented that and a beautiful plant to me at the school-wide assembly. Not very many dry eyes in the house! Won’t be loved this well anywhere else. Today is my last day.
12 comments:
The world we live in is insane, valuing arbitrary. So sorry for her and all of us. Still, the good she did doesn't go away. And she may be quite wrong about not being loved that well again. We can't control who loves us but we can love harder ourselves, and that is the work of growing up and growing older: needing to love more than needing to be loved. Or so it seems to me. Still, so shitty.
The world was made considerably poorer today.
That just sucks. But maybe she could look into SAT tutoring -- I see those ads all over from the prep schools (they train you) and the pay is good. Seems like something she might find rewarding, idk.
That does suck. So many things don't make sense.
Why is it so hard to provide full employment? (rhetorical question)
Economists like Keynes, Galbraith, Friedman have worked on this, of course.
And probably Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which I haven't read, says why as well as any other book or lecture could.
But it is very sad.
Full employment's unattainable. Beware anyone who aims for it.
Surely to say anything kind about Hayek makes you no friend of Zen.
My ex's predicament is due to the unnatural forces that swirl around government programs. In truth, if schools were properly funded she not only wouldn't have lost that job, she would never have had it.
Is there anymore evidence necessary for us to be able to say that California has gone from the Golden State to the Lead State? All these great things that CA is so famous for are nothing but farts in the wind when I read this. I get so angry, I need to watch out that I don't send an email that ultimately gets me fired.
That is so sad.
Schools everywhere here are losing "media specialists" (as we call them) as well. A thousand kids, each going through the media center once a week, and... nobody there? What, they're just going to magically absorb those books by osmosis? I don't even get how it's supposed to work.
Elementary school, guess what, whatever else you drape on, your one primary directive is literacy. It's the foundation for every other kind of education, it's the first thing that matters. And you can spare librarians while PE teachers are still employed?? I assure you, the once a week those kids go to PE is useless. The kids who are already physically active don't need it, and the ones who aren't are getting nothing out of half an hour a week.
Grrr.
Sorry, I've turned your ex's trouble into my soapbox, which you can see is well-worn on this issue. It's a crime that she and so many like her are not being allowed to do what they do for kids. I hope she finds another outlet for her talent.
I have to take issue with the remarks about PE. The kids need all they can get. There needs to be more PE, not less. Even that half hour is worth something, for their brains as well as bodies. Same for music classes. Grades and test scores rise as those things get added to the curriculum.
Having said that, my wife is a CSU professor and her stories about what students are doing and saying, and the things I have seen them write, would boggle the mind. They are mostly products of CA schools and the level of literacy among them is low enough to have one thinking that its all over now.
There is a basic writing skills literacy test they have to take to get to upper division status, and the things I've seen upper division student write wouldn't have gotten me out of high school freshman English class. What's the point of that test?
CA is now 50th in dollars spent per K-6 student. WTF? Mississippi spends more on their primary school kids than CA does. Huh?
The temptation to just give up on it is huge, but we can't. We would betray the efforts of all those like Mrs. T mentioned here. I can personally attest to her energy and sense of commitment and her ability with children and we need thousands more just like her.
Who's running that chickenshit school district anyway?
Sorry it's taken awhile to get back to this topic, Don.
Certainly, Hayek is the darling of the Libertarian and Conservative Right.
Galbraith wrote of economists who left central Europe and came to America and set up the so-called 'Chicago school'. Most were, like Milton Friedman, radical humanists who did not want the state to interfere with/in the the lives of individuals.
Yes, 100% employment seems an unattainable dream because of the way modern economies operate.
It's a shame, though
Friedrich won the Nobel and, AFAIK, never wrote NYTimes op-eds, so that means he can trump the libs who trot out Krugman so regularly.
I, otoh, prefer Salma.
They do like their former Enron advisor, don't they.
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