Je Suis Charlie

Everything that can be said about the despicable murder of French journalists yesterday has been said already.  I will not pile on just because I too found the incident deeply disturbing.

Not surprisingly, the killing of cartoonists has led other cartoonists to make their own comments.

I like the image above, which was created in just a few hours by Lucille Clerc, a young French illustrator who has been based in London since 2008.  Simple and profound, it is an expression of loss, but also of defiance and courage.

It does not particularly resemble Clerc's typical works, which are intricately detailed.  Below is a representative sample commissioned for Eurostar's Metropolitan magazine.

Eurostar recently celebrated 20 years of high-speed rail service connecting London, Brussels and Paris.  The print is a joyous representation of the three cities and, by extension, the high points of European culture.  Seems appropriate at this moment.

Clerc made 100 copies, and all but two have been purchased.  If you'd like one for yourself, you can buy it for 100 pounds on her website, LucilleClerc.com.

Young Adult Fiction

One huge trend in literature has been the emergence over the last 70 years of a genre now described as "young adult fiction."

I think of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, published in 1951, as the first big title of this type.  The follow-ons are legion:  The Outsiders, Lord of the Flies, A Wrinkle in Time, Judy Blume's books, The Giver, R.L. Stine's Goose Bumps series, the Harry Potter adventures and the Hunger Games trilogy. Many fine books here.

Some YA books qualify as serious literature, but most do not.  What they seem to share is teenage protagonists.  It has been explained that teenagers seek understanding of their own situations and are less interested in, say, midlife crises or the issues of aging.  Fair enough.


(Curiously, it was reported in 2012 that more than half the YA titles now are purchased and read by people between the ages of 18 and 40.  Perhaps some people take a little longer to ease into adulthood.  Or maybe grownups' vocabularies are shrinking.  Who knows?)


Current Young Adult Titles

Every year since 1922, the Association for Library Service to Children has given annual Newbery Medals for young people's books, including for outstanding young adult titles.  Awards for 2014 books will be announced next month.



I went on a bibliophile website, Goodreads.com, to see which books are trending in its site's voting for this year's young adult award.

At right is the candidate most favored by Goodreads reviewers.  It embodies two of the most common themes of last year's YA output:

     -- It has a female author, like eight of the ten top-rated books.  (Take that, STEM people!  No glass ceiling in YA!)  Of course, it is possible that 80 percent of readers are female as well.

     -- Its plot radiates and pulses with magical realism.  Only three of the top 10 YA books seemed to involve plausible, real stories.  The other seven dabble in everything from the above-mentioned magical realism to fantasy to storytelling with a "possibly magic hairbrush."


Here is a description of the storyline in A Snicker of Magic:

      Twelve-year-old Felicity arrives in Midnight Gulch with her nomadic, ever-relocating
      mother.  The town, once filled with magic, has lost its gift.  Felicity, a "word person,"
      sees magic everywhere -- "shining above strangers, tucked into church eaves, in her
      dog's floppy ears."  Can she restore the town's magic and make Midnight Gulch her
      real home?

As I mentioned, this is the most favored book for the Newbery Medal this year.  I'm not a fan of magical realism, which is also a big theme in films and adult fiction these days.  I'm pretty sure my 12-year-old self would not have checked this book out at the library.

And reader reviews at Goodreads did run the gamut.  One woman even said it was a good "pick-me-up" to read when she was suffering a painful case of shingles.

Another said, "This was sweet and maybe a little too adorable.  I liked it though."

Then there were my people.  One wrote, "It was okay but the words moving around and having life almost was a little much for me. . . .  And when the shadows started dancing I was done."

Several commenters objected to the possibly excessive use of the (apparently positive) descriptive term "spindiddly." One posted this amusing graphic.

Much as the Goodreads people favor this book, I'm skeptical.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Newbery judging panel will award its prize to some other title.

More on that next month.

Notes from the Airport

I spent yesterday traveling across the country.  Several thoughts sprang to my wandering mind in the airport.
   
     1) This country really, really needs a dress code.
     As we waited to board the jet, I mused that a better photographer than I could create a website called People of the Airport, a variation on that People of Walmart thing that was cruel but popular a couple years ago.  So I looked up the idea and, sure enough, there already is such a site.  It is full of people in tailored, chic suits, not the Real People of the Airport.  At least not my airport.
   

      Think about it.  People seem to haul most of their wardrobes in the bags they check and carry onto the airplane.  Surely inside most of those bags are simple, tasteful clothing items in non-garish colors.

     I've said enough.  You know what I mean.  Let's up our game, folks.

     2) The "it" gift this last holiday season obviously was the "toast phone," available from Android, Apple and others.  Essentially it is a six-inch phone that accommodates people's increasing use of mobile for essential tasks like taking selfies and watching movies.

     Everyone in the airport seemed to be consulting these new, larger phones.  I'll probably get one myself pretty soon, but I wonder where this will end.  Will we have eight-inch phones in time for the next presidential election?  Phones that look suspiciously like tablet computers a few years after that?
      Think about the implications.  Those toast phones wouldn't fit in my pocket, and I don't think they can be particularly convenient for men to carry.
      Will the next fashion be very exaggerated cargo pants with great big pockets at the knee level? Will the market for murses (man purses) make a comeback after Jerry Seinfeld so effectively drove a stake through its heart all those years ago?
      I worry about these things.

      3) TSA Precheck is not bad.  With it, you don't have to dig out your laptop or baggie of tiny liquids for the luggage scanner.  You also can leave on your shoes and most of your clothing while walking through the metal scanner.
     Plus, you do not have to walk through a millimeter radiation full-body scanner, whose effects scientists are -- only now! -- starting to study.  Unfortunately, we learned recently that TSA employees really do laugh at our body images on those scans from a distant spot in the airport.

      Last year, I was offered the opportunity to purchase Precheck authorization for $85, but I declined.  I seem to be sorted into the Precheck line on most flights anyway.  It is a small comfort when navigating the airport.

E-Cigarettes: Why So Angry?

E-cigarettes are becoming popular in the United States.  Like traditional cigarettes, they convey nicotine, but in a steam vapor, not in smoke that is inhaled into the lungs.

E-cigarettes employ delivery systems that look like actual cigarettes, and this seems to make health authorities' heads explode.

Now, as many states are legalizing largely unstudied marijuana for "medicinal" use, the FDA is keeping quiet about that and instead is going on the warpath about the nicotine in e-cigarettes because it is believed to be addictive and may cause yet-to-be specified harms.

Interesting.  People have been smoking cigarettes for more than 100 years.  There is incontrovertible evidence that inhaling the smoke in real cigarettes greatly damages the lungs and heart and raises the incidence of certain types of cancer.  Nicotine, not so much.

There is likely to be an outright ban on the sale of e-cigarettes to anyone under the age of 18, which makes sense.  I wouldn't recommend "vaping" myself, but then I also don't recommend drinking sugary sodas or riding a bicycle without a helmet.

In fact, there are three groups of people for whom e-cigarettes might be a very good idea indeed.

First are current cigarette smokers.  Between 400,000 and 500,000 Americans die earlier deaths each year, mostly of lung cancer and emphysema, following many years of smoking.  More than 18 percent of adults still smoke, and most of them want to quit. There is growing anecdotal evidence that e-cigarettes help them with this.  At its yet-to-be-defined worst, vaping is vastly safer than smoking.

Second are alcoholics in recovery.  Not all of these people smoke cigarettes, but studies suggest that more than half of them do so, at least for a time, substituting a bad drug for another that, in some ways, is worse.  If vaping helps them, I'm for it. (In fact, even more recovering alcoholics drink coffee, often lots of it, which suggests that it, too, is helpful through a very difficult process;  maybe the FDA should investigate the safety of the caffeine in coffee beans.)

Third are people with schizophrenia.  It has been observed for decades that almost all of them smoke cigarettes.  Scientists suggest that the active ingredient in nicotine binds to brain receptors that release dopamine and serotonin, offering comfort with a very challenging disease.  In addition, there is some evidence that nicotine may improve schizophrenics' focus and may, at the margin, turn down some of the noise in their heads.  Would it be so awful if switching to vaporized nicotine offered these unfortunate people some small comfort?

Common Core: Top-Down Ed Reform Doesn't Work

Below is a letter to the editor published in the New York Times the other day.  It references an earlier opinion piece, "Rage Against the Common Core," that was skeptical that setting new standards would achieve better academic results in public schools.

        "A significant group of students doing poorly are from backgrounds of chronic
        deprivation and neglect.  The No Child Left Behind law and the Common Core
        standards both ignore the problem:  chronic absenteeism, disorganized homes,
        living in shelters, parents incarcerated or using drugs, separation from siblings,
        foster care and more.

        "Those who develop these 'solutions' and the politicians who promote them show
        no understanding of the challenges these students and their teachers actually
        face.  No curriculum will address these obstacles to academic success."

The Times noted that "the writer was a teacher and a psychologist for the New York City public schools for 35 years."

Teachers understand this.  The idea that new top-down standards and testing will change schools is an idea that has been tried and tried again, at district, state and federal levels.  But it has failed, every time, for at least 30 years.  And yet we still keep trying it.


Why It Has Failed

Years ago, French schools used a single curriculum.  Every eight-year-old in every French classroom would read the same passage of the same book on the same day.  This seemed to work in France at the time, but at that time, all the students were French and there were homogeneous values across the country's culture.

The United States is not a homogeneous country.  We have students from a variety of family backgrounds and countries and speaking many different native languages.  There is no universal commitment to education from family to family.  Children are raised in a variety of situations, ranging from upper-middle-class security to utter chaos marked by poverty, family upheaval and parents who cannot organize their own lives, let alone attend to their children's schooling.

Put simply, students start from different places.  The idea that one set of education standards issued by the federal government will assure that they all end up in the same place -- with no adjustments along the way -- is ludicrous on its face.


What to Do

We need to tailor schools to work with students as they come.

In relatively wealthy districts with well-educated parents and intact families, the old paradigm of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. classes for 9 months each year still works pretty well.  In these districts, parents have for years resented the instruction time diverted to testing because their schools were effective and students finished high school ready to succeed in college or on the next step of their careers.

In inner-city districts with parents of all backgrounds, annual testing schemes have slotted schools and students as losers.  A more useful approach would be diagnostic tests at the beginning of each school year to give teachers an idea where individual students were weak and strong, and to help teachers address their individual needs.

Additionally, students in inner-city districts might benefit from longer school days, longer school years, extra P.E. periods, personal tutoring and regular contact between teachers and parents or guardians.

This would cost more than the average school program, but at least some of the needed funds have been there for years.  Every state I know of devotes vastly more per-student funding to school districts in high-poverty areas. So does the federal government.

Unfortunately, the money does not yield results.  Inner-city schools by and large are organized in the same traditional way as schools have been for generations.  The idea of starting with students -- individually, as they come -- seems not to be considered.

Unfortunately, mandating a new set of outcomes will not do any good until the process of schooling students -- students as they are -- is given as much attention as specifying what they should know at the end of their high school years.

Note:

I do not mean to say that the situation is impossible.  I know of many efforts that are helping poor children achieve and thrive, and I plan to describe some of them from time to time.

What distinguishes these successful efforts is that they are small in scale.  They are achieved by private and religious groups, by well-led charter schools -- essentially,  by community-based commitments to individual children and their needs.

Unfortunately, there is no top-down solution.  That is why federally imposed Common Core standards seem likely to fail.

Tree Huggers of Los Angeles

Much has been said about the California drought, which may be easing a bit with a more rainy fall and winter season.

I learned recently of one group that has been working for years to improve water flow through the almost entirely paved-over environment of Los Angeles.

Its founder, Andy Lipkis, explains the situation in a brief, watchable post below.




Also, below, is a 2011 description of a neighborhood project in one Los Angeles area.   It seems to have done a lot of good.



In fact, Californians approved a $7.1 billion water bond project in November.  Nobody seems to believe that the money will be enough to fix all the issues the state faces, and urban needs will have to compete with river health and agriculture demands for allocations of the money.

A bigger proposed bond program -- $11 billion in size -- was pulled from the ballot in 2012 after complaints that it was too expensive and larded with pork.  Both complaints were probably true.

But grass-roots efforts like those sponsored by TreePeople may gather momentum and scale to improve the situation even in an enormous area like the Los Angeles region, which is home to 25 percent of California's population.

Suspicious Dairy Products

Would you trust this cheese?

(As I prepare for another trip across the country, I am determined not to repeat errors I made on a similar journey last year.)

Last evening, we packed for our flight east.  As we were finishing, the Significant Other noticed two cups of yogurt and a good-sized chunk of Gouda cheese left in the refrigerator.  This morning he gave me the yogurt to add to my doggie bag from the previous evening's dinner.  He wrapped the Gouda in a Ziploc and placed that in his carry-on.

Surprisingly, both raised a stir with the TSA at the airport.

As I put the doggie bag avec yogurt on the X-ray line, I was told that yogurt was contraband.  And the security agent was absolutely right:  Yogurt is mostly liquid, and only the smallest containers of liquids are allowed on commercial jets today.

"You're right," I said.

The security agent told me he would remove the yogurt.  He put it in a trash can that was already filled with a great many bottles of suspicious water.  My doggie bag proceeded through the checkpoint.

Later, when I picked up my clothing and the doggie bag at the other end of the line, I found that the TSA agent had removed only one cup of yogurt.  The second remained in my plastic bag.

Maybe I was in a felonious mood.  Whatever.   I just kept the yogurt.  Later the SO ate it during our flight.

But think of the danger:  That cup of yogurt could have downed an enormous airliner!

--

The story does not end there.  Remember, the Significant Other was traveling through the TSA line with a large wedge of Gouda cheese.

Here, the TSA did its job.  After the SO's carry-on went through the X-ray machine, he and it were pulled over.  The carry-on was inspected carefully, and the cheese was discovered.   Both went through the security line again.

This time the Gouda passed.  We reunited and boarded our jet.

Later I found a big tube of sunblock that I had not remembered when I went through the TSA line.  Anyone who knows me can attest that I am a notorious scatterbrain; in this case, I simply forgot.

--

Happily, we arrived safely at our destination.