According to this article, this year's class of kindergarteners are, as a group, about 53% white, down from 59% five years ago, while Hispanic students are up from 19% in 2000 to 25% this year, outnumbering black students of the same age by almost 2 to 1.
This belongs on my blog for two reasons:
1) The increase in the population of Latinos in the United States is a huge factor in some of the work Notre Dame is doing right now, and especially in what we're doing with the ACE Academies. Combine the present national high school graduation rate for Latino students (less than 50%, depending on exactly who you ask) with the number of Latino students in the nation, and it doesn't take much specialized knowledge to guess what unfortunate fruits that coupling will eventually bear.
2) The article made me laugh out loud. I'm quite sure it was unintentional and that the writer bears no malice toward Latinos. Nonetheless, some of the phrasing made it sound like we're somewhat similar to a hoard of locusts, or we're carefully coordinating a slow invasion. My favorite example (emphasis mine):
In addition, more Hispanic children are likely because the number of Hispanic girls entering childbearing years is up more than 30% this decade, Kenneth Johnson, demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute says. "It's only the beginning."
Fr. Joe and I met about a year and a half ago when I went to him for confession at an ACE retreat, saw he was wearing a Salesian pin, and spent twenty minutes talking about how much we love the sisters before we even got to my confession. He was taught by them as a child and has stayed part of the family ever since (once a Salesian, always a Salesian!), so he knows most of the sisters I know. Now that we work together, he and I will not uncommonly have sessions consisting mostly of gushing about the Salesians. He recently returned from a trip to Mexico and then to the first profession of vows for the new Salesian sisters.
Fr. Joe: Wouldn't it be great to take a bunch of ACE people down to Mexico City? Just to learn about Mexico and the people and how it all affects what we do here.
Me: Yeah! I mean, we've got this whole campaign that kinda centers on that. Let me help you with that if it happens.
Fr. Joe: I'm going to think about that. It's not very expensive, either.
Me: And I bet you could get a benefactor to help fund it, or even cover the whole thing.
Fr. Joe: It's very possible.
(He leaves, then pops his head back in my door as he returns to his office, wearing a mischievous grin.)
Fr. Joe: You know, I can tell you're loosing your Salesian roots. The sisters would have said, "Maybe we can have a bake sale to help raise the money". You say, "Just get a benefactor!" That's Notre Dame talking.
"For me," Canada said, "the big question in America is: Are we going to try to make this country a true meritocracy? Or will we forever have a class of people in America who essentially won't be able to compete, because the game is fixed against them? [...] There's no way that is good conscience we can allow poverty to remain the dividing line between success and failure in this country, where if you're born poor in a community like this one [Harlem], you stay poor. We have to even that out. We ought to give these kids a chance."
-Geoffrey Canada, as quoted in Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes. Emphasis mine.
Confession: I have a little bit of what might be called survivor's guilt, or something akin to it. Statistically, kids like me -- Latinos, children of immigrants, and immigrants themselves -- have a higher drop-out rate than any other group (17%, while white youth are at about 6%, and Latinos make up 40% of all drop-outs). Those who do finish high school are still less likely to attend college, and those who do are less likely again to finish in four years, if they finish at all. Meanwhile, here I sit four days from having my Master's Degree conferred and a month away from working for a university (and not in the dining hall). I've spent a lot of time pondering the fortunate happenstance of my upbringing, the features of my childhood that planted me squarely on the road to higher education.
As far as I can tell, it was pure, unthinking luck on my part. I happened to have the father I have, to live the places I lived, to have certain opportunities plop themselves in front of me. I spent most of my childhood, nomadic though it was, in middle-class white neighborhoods, and I got all the perks that come with that. I am where I am now largely, maybe primarily, because I got lucky as a kid. Other kids not so different from me are struggling because they lived in a different neighborhood and got a different education.
Second confession, related to the first: that hits me as incredibly unfair, and it sticks in my craw.
There is much debate on why the poor are poor. I'm leaving that debate aside for now, because it is entirely irrelevant to my point: no one in their right mind or with a mustard seed of compassion is going to blame a third grader if she can't read. No one can possibly blame the five year old from a working class family because he starts kindergarten already at a disadvantage compared to his middle class peers. You might be able to place responsibility for an adult's situation in life on the adult because, of course, choices have consequences and people do make some truly terrible choices.
The thing is, there are a lot of kids out there suffering the consequences of someone else's choices. A lot of these kids aren't squandering their opportunities, they don't have opportunities. That's not okay.
This reality distracts me during faculty meetings and catches my wandering thoughts when I drive down the road. I high-jack conversations at parties to talk about it. It's why I'm moving up to Notre Dame and passing on any of several possibilities to stay in Texas near my family (with whom, as you must know if you've read this at all, I am totally obsessed). Because the piece of dirt a child lives on should not determine what is and is not available to her. As a human being, and especially as a Catholic, there is no way I can sit comfortably in my good fortune when so many children in my own country are effectively being denied a decent education.
I'm little-kid-with-a-drawing-look-mom-look-mom proud of the school I work at. Our development office put this together. It's a fair snapshot of the remarkable place we have, though I don't think anything short of a documentary would really capture the wonder of it.
(For my fam: yeah, there's one shot of me in there, and I'd guess about a fourth of those photos are mine.)
After many weeks of sky-high stress academia and life alteringly-awesome people and a couple weeks of utter relaxation with my family (who are equally as awesome), I'm back in Brownsville for year two at my school and year three in the teaching gig. I write from my bare classroom, being used today and tomorrow as the in-service room, after which I will begin plastering the room with butcher paper, border, clever posters, schedules, motivational sayings, Bible verses, and my own tangibly high expectations for my students.
Meanwhile, my community (minus four from last year, plus four newbies) is already having a ball. We spent yesterday evening plotting, over tacos and beer, which room of the house to convert to a chapel.
Frankly, I'm just giddy about the start of the new school year. I suspect it will be, to use the ubiquitous phrase, totally awesome.
"To be a believer today it so live a certain moral loneliness. To sustain faith today is not to vote with the majority, but rather to be what sociologist call a cognitive minority, that is, to stand outside the dominant consciousness”. -Ronald Rolheiser
Several months ago, my substantial posts sort of faded out. Two months ago, I made a few mobile posts. A little after that, within one week, five people asked me if my blog was dead. This was right at the end of the school year, when I was flooded with finals to grade and end-of-year events to attend, and I didn't have a moment to put a decent post together. Now I'm back at Notre Dame for the summer and utterly overwhelmed with work.
I don't intend to let this blog die. I enjoy writing it and, I'm told, others occasionally enjoy reading it. At the moment, however, I barely have time to do the work I need to do and make phone calls to my family and best friends.
Thus, to answer the query posed to me many times recently, no, Theophany is not dead. It is officially on hiatus, probably until the middle of July. At that point, the deluge of paper, projects, meetings, and events will have settled. Until then, I need to focus on keeping my head over water (yeesh). There may be the occasional mobile post since those require about 30 seconds of my time. Also, I'm still reading my blogs (though not as thoroughly as I once did) and sharing fun and interesting items in the thingy in the side bar.
Otherwise, Dear Readers, trust I am well and happy despite the sensory overload, and keep me in your prayers as I keep you in mine.
An e-mail I sent to a couple of my far-away ACE friends. Jackie and Zeiser are my housemates.
Last night, Guadalupe Regional had a fund raiser at Mr. Gatti's (pizza and arcade; kinda like chuckie cheese), which Jackie, Zeiser, and I attended. The three of us sit down at a table some distance from the "cool kids". Five minutes go by before one of my 8th graders comes over, points at Zeiser, and says, "Is that your boyfriend?"
With as straight a face and as flat a voice as I could manage, I said no. So she looks at Jackie, points Zeiser again, and says, "Is he YOUR boyfriend?".
It gets better. As the three of us are leaving, a 7th grader stops us, asks me the same question and gets the same answer, and likewise with Jack.
"Then why did they say he was dating one of you?" She looks at Zeiser, and says in a tone of voice that suggests HE wouldn't lie to her, "Are you dating either of them?"
Straight face, Zeiser goes, "Them? No. You ever heard of Shakira?"
My dad is a huge dork. Always has been. He paid over $700 for a VCR when they first came out, and spent a good chunk of his life recording everything of even mild interest he saw on television. I think he once figured out he could watch his recorded VHSs 24 hours a day for more than a month before rewatching anything.
One of these low-fi gems is a Neil Diamond Christmas special (we also own the accompanying CD). That special, watched year after year... until he met and married my step mom, come to think of it... anyway, it included Mr. Diamond singing Morning Has Broken. Before I was quite old enough to listen to and "get" the words, I loved that song. It's melody struck me and stuck with me.
Incidently, I don't care at all for Cat Stevens's version of the song. I'm just not a folky girl.
Then, I got to Notre Dame this past summer, and one day in mass, what to my wondering ears should come wafting through the air but another song with that same tune.
Christ be beside me, Christ be before me Christ be behind me, King of my heart Christ be within me, Christ be below me Christ be above me, never to part.
Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand Christ all around me, shield in strife Christ in my sleeping, Christ in my sitting Christ in my rising, light of my life.
I now find myself humming it constantly, thinking half the time of Morning Has Broken and the other half of Christ Beside Me.
If you're thinking, "Hey, didn't you blog about another Notre Dame song you're now, like, totally in love with?" You are correct, sir. There's just a lot of reasons I love Notre Dame.
Our school is closed today and tomorrow because the entire faculty (well, nine of the twelve of us) is going to a conference in New Orleans. Our school is part of the NativityMiguel Network, which is a very particular model of school. This serves as your notice of not only what I'm up to, but how un-secretly excited I am to be both out of school and in New Orleans. Yee. Haw.
I've cued up a few posts to magically appear while I'm away, including the picture of the day. They'll all be of my last trip to New Orleans in 2007 as an insignificant speck on a research team with a professor and some peers. This will ironically make my posting while away more regular and predictable than my posting when I'm home.
Back Saturday night. Please pray for my co-workers and me, and all those attending this conference.
I don't believe I ever set foot in a Catholic school before I arrived at Saint John Bosco in August 2008 to teach there, but I very quickly realized that it was a very different environment from anything I had experienced before. ACE's very existence is predicated on the idea that Catholic schools are vital to the welfare of the country, never mind the well-fare of Catholic children. It was often said that our objective was not to take over public schools, but to fill a need public schools could not -- we aren't necessarily better, we're different.
Deacon Greg posted snippet of a New York Times article taking a look at the current crisis Catholic schools are facing and the measures being taken to stem this particular tide. Not surprisingly, Notre Dame's expansive work in this field came up, as did ACE's legendary founder, mentioned here before, Fr. Scully.
The Archdiocese of Washington was so desperate to save seven struggling parochial schools last year that it opted for a solution that shook Catholic educators to the core. It took down the crucifixes, hauled away the statues of the Virgin Mary, and — in its own word — “converted” the schools in the nation’s capital into city charter schools.
The Washington choice seemed to limn in its most extreme form the predicament facing Catholic education: How to maintain a Catholic school tradition of no-frills educational rigor, religious teaching and character-building — a system that has helped shape generations of America’s striving classes since the turn of the last century — when Catholics are no longer signing up their children.
“It was taken for granted for a long time that Catholic schools would always be there,” said Dr. Karen M. Ristau, president of the National Catholic Educational Association, a lobbying group. “People are beginning to realize that this is a false assumption.”
The Rev. Timothy R. Scully, who led the Notre Dame task force study widely credited with igniting the current self-examination, was more blunt.
“There is a window open, and we may have a chance to reverse the trend of decline,” he said. “But I’m not sure how long it will remain open.”
(I wrote this Thursday, January 15th, but am only just posting it now.)
It's 7:30 a.m. I just got to school, and I have already been to Mexico (yes, the country) and Wal-Mart today.
When I got to school, I took a moment and glanced at my blog feeds, discovering this really wonderful video Paul posted.
And, because I am not quite mentally... normal, to me these things fit together.
Fret not, I'm going to attempt to explain. First, I need to back up.
I finally ordered a digital SLR last week. The days following saw me obsessively watching UPS's tracking site. The UPS man didn't show until Wednesday night about 6:30, when we were at dinner.When the doorbell rang, I quite literally leapt up, threw my chair back and ran to the door faster than I've run in at least six months. I came back with my package and the jitters, and one of my housemates said, "I would never have expected that from you."
"Well," I said, "I've wanted this for years."I looked down at the beautiful brown box and shrugged. "I love taking pictures."
Despite my overwhelming glee, I went to bed early. Two of my housemates are going on a ten-day mission to Mexico in April as chaperons for their students.This weekend was a pre-mission retreat, and they loaded the buses in Mexico at 6 a.m., so I volunteered to take them over the border.In the midst of my anxiety over getting my Volvo back into the United States, I could not help but smile and be stirred: it was an hours before daylight, but there was so much life, energy, and enthusiasm on and around those buses.
This brings us to the part where I’m thinking about Beethoven (watch the video) and sitting back in my teacher chair, suddenly struck by the power of passion.
I strung these events together in my head, and 1 Corinthians 12 leapt to mind: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit”.Generally, that’s applied to purely spiritual gifts.In that moment, though, I pondered that those gifts extend far beyond the invisible, mystical spirit.No, perhaps I should rephrase that -- the invisible, mystical spirit extends way beyond what we think it does.
You look at Beethoven and what he did, and you see extraordinary brilliance driven by other-worldly passion.You look at my housemates the other adults on that trip, and my coworkers, and you see depths of dedication fed by unearthly patience.You look at a dork like me and you see school-girl giddiness inspired by an unending wonder of everything around her.
God gives us gifts in the form of abilities and talents, of course.What good would those gifts be, though, without one other: simply giving a damn about something.Anything.Maybe it’s a Mother Theresa like drive to serve, or maybe it’s a love of marine life.Maybe it’s your friends or your children.Hopefully, it’s a couple things.Isn’t having the drive more important than having the talent?What has ever been accomplished without passion?
Beethoven had passion.Anyone who teaches, or works with kids at all, better have passion for it, even if it’s often shrouded under exhaustion and frustration, or get out of it.Parents are passionate about their children.Heck, even the relatively meaningless hobbies we have – taking pictures, knitting, doodling on napkins -- serve the purpose of giving us meaning.All of it puts a ribbon of significance into everything we do.
Which is kind of the point of this little nook of cyberspace.There’s a lot of theophany going on, both as vast, encompassing, and stunning, and as frequently unnoticed as the sky.I suppose I’m a cloud watcher.Sometimes things take forms and shapes that force me to take a moment and sit back in my chair, and just take it in.
Oddly enough, this time coincided with my 500th post here.Funny, eh?
Two stories from two of my roommates. The first was related by an 8th grade language arts teacher.
Teacher:(aloud, at the end of her rope) Lord, please give me patience! Student: (raises hand) Teacher: (hopeful) Yes? Student: Ma'am, did you know when you pray for something like patience, God doesn't give you patience, He gives you an opportunity to be patient. So right now, He's answering your prayer. Teacher:(flabbergasted)
And tonight, as she grades geography quizzes, my 3rd grade roommate cried out, both incredulously and triumphantly:
Last week, fellow ACEr Lindsay posted some Picasa fun on her blog. Coincidentally, I had spent some time earlier that very day doing similar projects, which I now present below.
If you're out for a simple photo managing and/or editing software, I'd strongly recommend Picasa. It's easy to use, pretty versatile, and free!
Just like last year, here's a photographic, slightly epileptic, look back at this year for me. Highlights:
My 2nd VIDES formation camp, this time having a clue
My 2nd semester teaching, still without a clue
The St. Vitus Fools, our drama club, and our production of "Looking Glass Land, which was a sucess largely because no one could tell none of us had a clue.
Please note: There are two people who were as important in my life this year as anyone else, and more important than most, even though I only saw them once in April for a few hours each (hence the painful dearth of pictures and sinful under representation). You know who you are. This year would not have been nearly as wonderful without your constant long-distance support, laughter, and presence. Thank you. I love you more than I know how to say.
All the pictures in the movie are available here, should you be inclined to take a more leisurely look.
This song has been in my head all week. They sing it pretty often at the basilica at Notre Dame, which is where I first heard it. There's one line where the choir director always stomps his foot so loud it sounds through the whole church. That's my favorite part, and I confess I miss it sometimes.
Merry Christmas, Dear Readers!
My life flows on in endless song above earth's lamentation. I hear the real, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation.
(chorus) No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I'm clinging. Since Love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing? Through all the tumult and the strife I hear that music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul! How can I keep from singing? What though the tempest loudly roars, I hear the truth; it liveth. What though the darkness round me close, songs in the night it giveth While tyrants tremble, sick with fear, and hear their death knells ringing; When friends rejoice both far and near, how can I keep from singing?
We (ACErs) were let in on this event while in Austin for our retreat this past weekend. Later, some of us delighted in seeing Fr. Scully breakin' it down on the dance floor, and one of my good friends commented, "Give this man a presidential award!"
I love ACE.
The rest of the article is here. it has a pretty good summary of the ACE program, in case you're curious exactly what I'm up to, and short (very short) list of some of ACE's associated programs and initiatives.
At retreat, Fr. Scully emphasized that he was getting this award on behalf of all the people who do and have ever done work with the Alliance for Catholic Education. When I signed up for this thing, I thought, "Hey, grad school AND service!". I am realizing more and more that ACE is a lot bigger than that. It is, in fact, a movement unto itself, and I'm profoundly excited that I'm part of it.
Father Scully receives Presidential Citizens Medal By: Julie Hail Flory Date: December 10, 2008
Rev. Timothy R. Scully, C.S.C., professor of political science and director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives (IEI) at the University of Notre Dame, received a 2008 Presidential Citizens Medal in an Oval Office ceremony held Wednesday (Dec. 10).
One of the highest honors the president can confer upon a civilian – second only to the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the Presidential Citizens Medal recognizes U.S. citizens who have performed exemplary deeds of service for the nation. Since its establishment by executive order in 1969, some 100 people have received the award.
Here's the deal, Dear Readers: our house's internet is down. Because of our location, we have to have satellite internet, and satellite puts a cap on our bandwidth in any consecutive thirty days. We have seven adults in our house who use the internet on a regular basis. That means, basically, that we WILL go over our quota. When that happens, we're penalized with a serious squeeze on available bandwidth (or something like that).
What that means is that while our internet is still technically there, it's useless for anything other than basic HTML e-mail checking. I can only do most internet activities from school.
While this is a good thing for the amount of work I will get done at home, it is a bad thing for the amount of blogging I am able to do. I'm sorry. This is just how it has to be. It's not you, it's me.
Rev. Timothy R. Scully, C.S.C., professor of political science and director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives (IEI) at the University of Notre Dame, received a 2008 Presidential Citizens Medal in an Oval Office ceremony held Wednesday (Dec. 10).