more school notes

[pantryslut]

1. At this point in the school tour project, I believe I could answer just about every anxious parent's questions about the OUSD kindergarten options process myself -- and I haven't even done it yet.

2. Also, listening to many, many middle-class white people in a row try to figure out how to game the system ("strategize" if you prefer) can be quite exhausting. For some reason "dot your i's and cross your t's and be persistent" is never the right answer for them.

3. This week's school does not have old hippies teaching Jefferson Starship (not Airplane, Starship) lyrics as part of their music curriculum. (And yet there is a music curriculum.) Hooray!

Comments

[wild_irises]

"Dot your i's and cross your t's and be persistent" is a fine philosophy, but it is not gaming the system. Gaming the system is how you get out of having to do the work.

[pantryslut]

Well, yes. The answer is, stop trying to game the system and make sure you follow all the rules instead, to the letter. The system rewards persistence, not corner-cutting. There is no end-run so stop looking. You Are Not Special.

As I said, this is never the right answer for them.

[oyceter]

Heh. I read articles about middle-class white parents complaining about how other middle-class white parents get an unfair advantage because they moved to a lower-income neighborhood with historically lower test scores and how they are wringing their hands over this blah blah blah. (for SF, at least) I roll my eyes at all of them.

[pantryslut]

Horizontal hostility between parents in the public school system is ugly, and its expressions among certain demographics definitely eyerolling at best, but also unsurprising -- we're all crabs in a barrel fighting over ridiculously limited resources. Nonetheless I keep wanting to slap every [redacted] parent who brags about all the "extras" (which shouldn't be extras!) their PTA brings in, because, duh, if they paid higher taxes every kid in Oakland (and beyond!) could have the same things too. Oops, here I go again.

(edited to actually make sense. Directions are hard.)

[oyceter]

Hee, that makes more sense! I don't really blame any parents for the horizontal hostility, since, like you said, it's a rigged system, but it does really frustrate me when the same hostility is extended vertically (or, er... down the power ladder? directions, ugh). Or I guess.. the lack of acknowledgement that there is a "down on the ladder."

In conclusion: stop fighting over the same slice of pie and make bigger pie! (Of course that is always easy to say...)

[pantryslut]

Oh, I know exactly what you mean. Like, there wouldn't have to be a "down the ladder" if we stopped hoarding pie. Am I straining the metaphor here? If we stormed the barricades together to demand a bakery!

[malka]

I think the horizontal hostility would be almost guaranteed to lead to vertical hostility, because the "lose" condition of horizontal hostility is being treated like someone further down the ladder. That would encourage horizontal hostility people to push hard to distance themselves from people further down the ladder, and that's halfway to vertical hostility.

I think the more-pie solution is the only one that works, long-term. Plus weighting the pie less, I guess, although I don't know how to do that either. Decoupling it so that it's easier for the amount of pie one gets tomorrow to be independent of the amount of pie one gets today?