The Attacks South Philadelphia High School: A Plea for School and Social Reform

I am currently a teacher's aide at South Philadelphia High. This school has made national news over the past couple of months due to a racially motivated attack on Asian students. The context of the attacks was a series of 'jumpings' that went back and forth between Asian and African American students. The attacks that occurred on November 3rd were indiscriminate attacks against the minority Asian population of the school. A number of students were hospitalized and the Asian students refused to come to school for a week, as they demanded more security. This incident has inspired me to assess what type of intervention is necessary at the school and the underlying factors to the attacks. 

In order to understand the impulse toward violence one must first look at the context. All of the decent schools in the city require applying. The students that don't get in to these schools are lumped together in their local district schools, such as South Philly High. This concentrates all of the underperforming students. Such a pool of students also concentrates all of the most problematic families, such as those with an imprisoned parent, or a drug addict parent. At the very least you can expect the parents to be severely overworked, undereducated, and under-compensated.

While I do not want to demonize the "culture of poverty" of which students of SPHS come, it is also undeniable that such a culture is prone to have high levels of problems, such as drugs, a lack of parent guidance, emotional and economic support. This puts a severe emotional toll on the students of such households.

Given that so many of the students are accustomed to these problems, they are also apt to re-enact these problems and the negative feedback surrounding them within every authority figure. This is the backdrop of SPHS. It feels like a prison, through which disruptive students are pushed through, as if on a conveyer belt, and on which about 40% are discarded. Such a concentrated pool of under-performing students, who bring with them the baggage of coming from an economically stressed household, demands greater resources; The school is in desperate need of more counseling services and highly skilled teachers that are able to implement lessons in such a difficult environment.

The problem with this student demographic is not that they are somehow diseased with laziness and coddled with welfare, such that they never learn to pull themselves up from their bootstraps. Rather, the problem is such that schools cannot be reformed simply through a revision of procedures and curriculum; School reform must be accompanied by socio-economic reform. Discrimination and violence will not dissappear once such broad scale reform takes place, but the conditions breed violence and racism among inner city youth would certainly be assuaged. 

We do not live in a just society where everyone has an equal opportunity. Those who are born into wealth find it extremely easy to perpetuate their wealth with investments and a top rate education. Conversely, those born into poverty find it far too easy to fall into a lifestyle of long working hours, little pay, poor budgeting, and debt slavery.

Only when education reform is coupled with socio-economic reform will it actually achieve genuine results. The learning gap can only be closed with such a broad scale intervention. In the mean time the following are needed:

-A massive influx of counseling services is needed. The process of referring students to these services needs to be made easier. 

-Teachers need to receive more supervision, such as through inter departmental reviews, to promote a positive learning environment.

-More tax money for education is needed, but at the same time education professions need to be more competitive. There are far too many unproductive administrators. Higher quality teachers and administrators are not only better performing, but more productive. The hiring process for teachers should be more based on one's intelligence, writing, and interview than simply on experience and being certified.

The Nostalgia of Holiday Gifting

Holiday gifting is all about a nostalgia for a home for ever lost to a mechanized world: housing factories and cheaply made (foreign) goods extracted through western imperialism. This era of planned obsolescence has no memory.

We struggle to distance ourselves from the inherent exploitation that shapes and furnishes our lives by gifting local craft made goods. We offer these gifts to imbue a sense of nostalgia in the gift receiver and ameliorate his or her spiritual homelessness. 

David Lowenthal "Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory"

"Medical respectability spread the disease (of nostalgia) from provincial soldiers and newly transplanted countryfolk to the educated elite. Philippe Pinel limned the symptoms about 1800: 'a sad, melancholy appearance, a bemused look,... an indifference toward everything;... the near impossibility of getting out of bed, and obstinate silence, the rejection of food and drink; emaciation, marasmus and death.' Another physician found that in 'cadavers of patients who had died of this disease..the lungs adhered tight to the pleura of the thorax [and] that the tissue of the  'lobe' was thickened and purulent. Victims of nostalgia in face died because of meningitis, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis, but because everyone believed nostalgia fatal, it so became. No cure was found. The nineteenth century transformed nostalgia from a geographical disease into a sociological complaint. Its early victims had been countryfolk lost in the anonymity of army or metropolis. Their desire to return was literal, oriented toward closed, familiar environments. As local ties dissolved, nostalgia became a generalized sense of loss, focused less on the locality than on the remembered childhood."

Those O'Connells, O'Connors, O'Callaghans, O'Donoghues--all the Gaels-- were one...with the very landscape itself...To run off the family names was to call to vision certain districts--hills, rivers and plains; while contrariwise, to recollect the place-names in certain regions was to remember the ancient tribes and their memorable  deeds. How different it was with the Planters round about them. For them, all that Gaelic background of myth, literature and history had no existence...The landscape they looked upon was indeed but rocks stones and trees"

Daniel Corkery quoted by Lowenthal

someday i'd like to do a history of pseudo epidemiology....

science is secretly very unlike itself.

who's coming ???

For many families in the province of Québec, sugar time is like an annual pilgrimage. It is a time to revisit the foundations of our heritage and its values, to meet with family and friends eating, singing and dancing to songs and music transmitted from generation to generation. In a way it is a return to our roots reminding us of who we are and what we have been through. It is a cheerful period when on a Sunday afternoon you forget your troubles, appointments, deal signings and phone messages to return.

furness arts library at penn

THE GOTHIC

Rouen Cathedral (French: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen)

         

John Ruskin:

"For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”

I believe somewhere John Ruskin asserted that a building does not reach its pinnacle of aesthetic beauty until about 500 years of age.

Courbet, Le Chateau De Chillon (The Castle Of Chillon)

i’ve perfected the art and science of belgian waffle making…

you must separate the egg whites, beat them hard, and then fold them into the batter to make the waffles extra crisp and yummy.

The Legacy of Liberal Tolerance

The 19th century German anthropologist (the combination of ‘German’ and ‘Anthropology’ is a clear red flag) Johann Friedrich Blumenbach specialized in the study of human races and racial taxonomy. He postulated that physical characteristics constitute an idea of race, which also determine certain forms of character. Blumenbach, to the surprise of his European readers, asserted that “our black brethren” have “a natural tenderness of heart…which has never been benumbered or extirpated on board the transport vessels or on the West India sugar plantations by the brutality of their white executioners.” In fact “they can scarcely be considered inferior to any other race.” He cites the physical anthropologist Niebuhr to support this astonishing claim: “The principal characteristic of the Negro, especially when he is reasonably treated, honesty towards his masters and benefactors.” Wow! A race of people who harmoniously contract into servitude with the utmost humility and gratefulness, if we can just learn to treat them tolerantly. Is Starbucks the 21st century progeny of Blumenbach? Do we not hear an echo of Blumenbach in Starbucks’ Global Responsibility Report? If Blumenbach were alive today, would he not be a distinguished professor of business ethics/theorist of imperialist conquest or a socially responsible CEO?

sphs

i like my new job, but hope i don't get assaulted.

what i must do

some day i need to read the complete human comedy and in search of lost time.

sasquatch lives

Four Tops-Baby I Need Your Lovin'

boys have to convince girls to surrender their lovin'

The Specter of Bush-Cheney

On July 30th a federal judge ordered the release of Mohammed Jawad, a former Guantánamo detainee represented by the ACLU, and was originally detained at roughly the age of 13.  It was determined that his confession to throwing a grenade that injured 2 US soldiers was obtained under torture by Afghani Police, and therefore not usable in court.  This sparked a renewed interest by the Justice Department into the treatment of detainees, but limited to cases handled by the CIA. 

To everyone's great surprise this inquiry unearthed some rather erie Justice Department memos outlining acceptable forms of torture.  The Rachel Maddow Show highlights some particularly horrendous "abuses" found in the sparsely declassified sections of the report, including: mock executions used to frighten detainees, water boarding an individual 183 times, a pressure point technique that restricted the flow of oxygen to the brain, a report of detainee beaten to the point of death, threats against the children of detainees and a threat that a detainee's mother would be raped in front the detainee. 

How could such horror occur?  Thank God we have our liberal pragmatic messiah committed to Judicial oversight, international law, and diplomacy.  After all, one of Obama's first moves in office was to announce the closing of Guantánamo, a move that Cheney fiercely denounced in town hall meetings across the country.  Yet, something went awry with Obama's commitment to ending the horrors of the Bush-Cheney years.  He seemed to have inadvertently enabled the continuation of torture by defining detainees as "products of counterterrorism operations rather than of armed conflict."  Now Obama and the Justice Department are alleging to investigate illegal uses of torture, however, perhaps because of some sort of very clever Bush-Cheney specter, torture is still widespread and legal! 

What happened?!  Well, Obama has actually only outlawed detention centers operated by the CIA under a non short term/transitional basis (whatever that means), while additionally leaving open the potential for torture in any military or privately contracted detention center.  Obama and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, are not questioning torture as a reliable method of obtaining confessions, but rather specific non prescribed torture tactics such as the staging of mock executions.  Last time I checked the Geneva conventions did not allow for water boarding someone over a 100 times and outsourcing particularly horrendous torture tactics to privately contracted defense forces.

All of this amounts to little more than a liberal facelift of Bush policies.  The Justice Department may release innocent people based on flimsy evidence, but it has little interest in prosecuting those who committed torture or even in ending torture in our current "counter terrorist" operations.

yummy german food

sauer rüben, weisswurst mit senf, sauergurken und pommes..... mmmmmmmm

i love turquoise and brown

Hoping to work here:

meetup.com

I have always wanted to live in Greenpoint...

Francis Bacon's Poetics of the Grotesque

The retrospective for the twentieth century figurative painter Francis Bacon on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows Bacon's belaboring exploration of the grotesque. He is fixated on both religious iconography such as in his paintings inspired by Velazquez, and malformed depictions of enigmatic carcasses. 

Though Bacon seems to recycle the same sort of grotesque in his oeuvre to an extent that becomes exhausting there is something still powerful in his poetics of the grotesque. He reminds us of bygone times before the age of the laboratory and medicalization of illness when the temple was a site of ritual killings and sacrifice. As Yve Alain Bois remarks in his essay, "Base Materialism," on Bataille and the photographer Eli Lotar: We live in an age where the slaughterhouse, just like the madman, is quarantined from everyday life. In his triptych series titled after the T.S. Eliot poem Sweeney Agonistes, Bacon depicts enigmatic fragmented lumps of life matter. The extreme upward tilt of the paintings draws the viewer into the painting, while having the contradictory effect of flattening the picture plane. In portraying such liminal figures that hover between life and death and inserting them between flat and deep space, one confronts the return of the repressed. That which is repressed and sublimated inevitably intrudes as the signified momentarily catches up to and disrupts the signifier. The horror in these works is in their representing the repression of violence. As Bois argues: "To show violence purely and simply would be a way of incorporating it; it is more effective to underscore how it is evacuated."

Bacon's painting Blood on Pavement similarly hovers between deep and flat space. The obscure blood stain is a trace of a violence and trauma that remains absent. The horror of Bacon's imagery lies not in its portrayal of violence, but rather in its undefinability that places the viewer between the sublimation and intrusion of the trauma. It is a horror that remains truly other and resists incorporation and resolution in the quotidian. He reminds us that the comforting sanctity of our daily latte and other objects of commercial consumption is  continually haunted by wars, sweatshops, and environmental devastation. Bacon does not naively revel in the violence of the status quo, but rather exposes the ways in which we sublimate and expunge the traces of violence in presenting objects which remain liminal and resist foreclosure.  

Latest concern

Helping kids with reading and arithmEtic can only be so interesting. Plus, I am beginning to fear that my intelligence is regressing to their level.

apple cider vinegar cures all

I have a lingering cold that I am expecting to eliminate with Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar. Here's what Earthclinic.com says about the health benefits of drinking Apple Cider Vinegar: the reported cures from drinking Apple Cider Vinegar are numerous. They include cures for allergies (including pet, food and environmental), sinus infections, acne, high cholesterol, flu, chronic fatigue, candida, acid reflux, sore throats, contact dermatitis, arthritis, and gout. One reader reported that a shot of ACV saved him from going to the emergency room for heart pain. Apple Cider Vinegar also breaks down fat and is widely used to lose weight. It has also been reported that a daily dose of apple cider vinegar in water has high blood pressure under control in two weeks!

Being interrogated by people much younger than I

A few weeks ago a student of mine was joking about how there is a ghost whose name is also Scott and who roams the school. This same student was asking me whether I was married or if I had a girlfriend, which for some reason made me think back to the previous incident. I began to think that she must have been suggesting that I am in some way like a ghost, particularly that my soul appears to be in slumber, a recent very 'emo' worry of mine. I think that I often appear like a nervous robot shuffling around using far too many words they don't understand, and totally unyeilding to their gestures of kindness and appreciation and rigidly adhering to the plan I have set forth for them (pretty much exactly how I feel about my father minus the part about word usage).

2009

It is new year’s eve! YAY. Another year closer to death on which to mark my lack of accomplishments.

Obviously I have too much free time

I recently learned that Zodiac signs are very week to week. My friend Jashin had a thorough Zodiac book and I read the description of my zodiac birth week which is on the Cancer/Gemini Cusp, known as the cusp of magic. It noted that I possess an interesting combination of logic and feeling and that I am forever 21 years old.

Here's an overview I found online (this website places the beginning of the cusp at the 20th, but Jashin's book started it at the 19th, my birthday) :
-- Possess the flighty and energetic traits inherent in Gemini --
-- Possess the deep feeling inherent in Cancer --
-- Often categorized as inspired individuals --
-- Intensely devoted to loved ones --
-- Find it difficult to keep an eye on the desired goal --
-- Prone to drift --
-- Apt to repress feelings --

AND-

Notable Gemini/Cancer Cuspians Include:
Cyndi Lauper; Errol Flynn; Meryl Streep; Kris Krisofferson; and Phylicia Rashad (absent from the list: Jean Paul Sartre, born June 21, 1905).

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Nytimes:
A crazed horde of shoppers looking for post holiday bargains shattered the doors to a Walmart at 5am Friday morning and trampled an employee to death.

Butttub:

Black Friday Earns its Name

some possible good news

Obama might choose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, to lead the EPA.

more griping

Obama's Economic Policy People:

Robert Rubin, an economic adviser to Obama, oversaw the risk management at the recently collapsed super bank Citigroup. Larry Summers, soon to be the director of Obama's National Economic Council, the Treasury Secretary under Clinton "championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the financial instruments — a k a toxic assets — that have spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the globe." Larry Summers also worked at the IMF, along with Geithner, the current president of the Federal Reserve and Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary. Each one of these picks represent an ideology of deregulation and neoliberalism that fueled our current economic crisis; And these are the people that are supposed to steer the ship of state toward its salvation with policies of 'change' and 'spreading around the wealth????'

Obama's (dis)appointments

Naomi Klein from yesterday's democracy now:

"..what we can expect from Summers and Geithner, I think it's clear that there's going to be a major departure from the idea logy that the government can't do anything...we're going to see a lot of investments in infrastructure...but the key issue and this is where I think we want to concentrate our energies because...we all want to be optimistic, but I think part of what got us into this situation where we've seen these very disappointing appointments has been that we have not been honest about the legacy of the Clinton years. So much mis-information has been spread during the election campaign because it was a nice message to present the '90s as these wonder years in contrast to the Bush years, and that is exactly the situation when you have a Summers [Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, and recently picked by Obama to head the National Economic Council] going down as some sort of wise man instead of going down with Allen Greenspan."


Also check out Jeremey Scahill's piece on Alternet highlighting the 'liberal hawks' behind Obama's foreign policy team.

to the very small number of californians who read this

why not vote nader? obviously obama is going to sweep california.

Our Supposed Capitalist-Socialist Hybrid Economy

From James K. Galbraith's Plan in this month's Harper's series of essays: How to Save Capitalism:

"The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets."


The idea that America is a mix of capitalism and socialism is now the new liberal parlance. The central flaws of capitalism, its reifying logic of unfettered and self interested competing parties that gracefully ignores a sub-history of blood/slavery/exploitation, are no longer relevant now that capitalism has subsumed socialism with things like welfare, public housing, income tax, and public education. (Never mind the labor wars that ensured every one of these things, and continue to be the basis for 'change' and corporate benevolence).

Of course, 'they,' Bush and his cronies, oligarchs consisting of developers-Bechtel and Haliburton- and oil companies, represent a perversion of our harmoniously mixed hybrid capitalism. While Galbraith's criticism of corporations manipulating government to gain contracts and power rings very true, the theoretically underpinnings of his critique are quite murky.

Should the government untangle itself from big business, and in what way in particular (in campaign reform/corporate lobbying or in dismantling welfare and regulation à la Clinton) , and if it does then is it the case that the underlying principles of the 'free market' will best serve our public interests? The irony of Galbraith's critique is that it ends with a plea for meeting our climate crisis via "direct public action and the cooperation of the private sector," or in other words, government contracts with (renewable) energy corporations (which was the basis of his critique of Bush & Company).

The central questions that haunt Galbraith's critique:
a) Are public interests best met through free markets?
b) Is profit in a capitalist system of exponential growth based on immutable principles of supply and demand or is it rather based on exploitation/ constantly being overcharged for services to fill the pockets of the top 1% who control 33% of the wealth and CEOs who make about 400 times that of the average worker?
c) If we accept a hybrid of government planning/money and the private sector how can this do anything but enabling monopolies and public spending that is well beyond the cost of the actual services?