Some Food for NYC Thought

The New York Times has published the results of a survey of thousands of New York City residents. The results are interesting but not surprising. Here's a quick summary and brief analysis:

• The areas that indicate the lowest satisfaction with NYC's government services are also the poorest, meaning that they are the ones most likely to utilize government services and most likely to need them.
• Measures of sidewalk maintenance, playgrounds, street maintenance, rat control, and neighborhood cleanliness all get the lowest ratings in the poorest neighborhoods, suggesting that the city concentrates its efforts in more affluent areas.
• While only 33% of NYC residents surveyed are satisfied with NYC's public after-school programs, 57% of those who have attended a NYC public school after-school program in the last 12 months give good or excellent ratings to the program's service. This suggests that the data presented here don't tell the full story--in other words, as usual, statistics are misleading.
• 78% of those surveyed gave excellent or good ratings to the way the City of New York provides services in "your language." This suggests that either the survey was offered in multiple languages, or it was only given to those who speak English or Spanish.
  
• New Yorkers are dissatisfied with NYC's public housing, its services for protecting children at risk of abuse and neglect, its services for addressing homelessness, the NYC public schools, air quality, and the way NYC spends tax dollars.
  
• However, New Yorkers are very satisfied with NYC.gov, the city's public libraries, 311, 911, citywide fire protection, neighborhood emergency services, Medicaid, public senior centers, and subway daytime safety.
  

On Our Generation, and Optimism in Recessive Times

I have mixed feelings about this article from today’s New York Times Magazine titled “Generation OMG.” I recall learning about an era called the Roaring ‘20s, a time right before the Great Depression when life was lavish, parties were like dreams, and the future seemed wide open for anything to happen. Is it really true that a generation on the brink of entering this possibility-filled world, a generation so close to this recent forgotten time that they can see it in the tired eyes of parents and older friends, abandoned all ideas that the prosperous life that those before them had lived could become a possibility for them too?

In this article, the author quotes an English professor as saying, “The ‘30s challenged the whole idea of the American dream, the idea of open economic possibilities…The version you get of that today is the loss of confidence on the part of both parent and children that life in the next generation will inevitably be better.”

I think there are some crucial cultural differences between our generation and the one that came of age during and immediately following the Great Depression. For one, we are significantly more connected. We are in communication constantly and we participate in digital forums where we bounce ideas off each other, form interest groups and partnerships before we even meet, and develop programs before we acquire the resources to support them. Additionally, overall we are significantly more educated. We have the social, human and cultural capital to understand the economic situation and how similar situations have played out historically; further, we have the tools to make the best of our situation and the ability to balance risk with safety and security while pursuing innovative courses of action.

For our younger counterparts, those whose parents are seeking to put them in daycare because they’re working longer hours or those who are just learning to read and write in Kindergarten, those who are learning life through the lens of an economic downturn, I think there is actually great hope. For all the reasons cited above, the youngest of our citizens have resources and tools at their disposal that were unfathomable in the 1930s. Further, these young people ten or twenty years behind us will come of age in a world that is being redefined by us. They may face more of the “psychic scars” that Kate Zernike discusses, but couldn’t they be mediated by the unabashed optimism of impressive innovation, young leadership, and bold assertion of new approaches?

Zernike acknowledges these possibilities toward the middle of her article. She writes:

Surveys have shown young people becoming more civic-minded in the last four years, and those who study them suggest this will increase, if only because the jobs will be in creating the public institutions and infrastructure of a new economic order. And with the assumptions of the past decade now popped, the older among the recession youth might feel bolder striking out in more creative directions.

Through questionable stimulus bills and excessive layoffs, through the closing of companies and the changing of mindsets, we, the 20-somethings, wild and smart, are poised to re-frame the American economic and social order. Perhaps we saw this coming--many of us have been trained to think outside the box, to push the limits of the way we understand the world and to seek creative solutions to problems we identify. We have been building this capacity and this energy, almost as if we have been waiting for this moment to throw it all out there into the world and start something new. Whether we repeat the trends of the early 20th century or we define a new world order, unique from anything seen thus far, has yet to be determined. As we break up the forms and feel new things, to use the words of Michael McClure, we must declare ourselves the shepherds of change and the leaders into the brave new world. For our peers and for those who tread lightly behind us, soaking up the world through our schools, we must fearlessly build a future full of days that are definitionless and open, that prioritize creativity and maximization of talent over commitment to routine and safety at the expense of innovation.

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

I wonder if I should have taken the one less traveled by.

If I weren’t sitting here right now, reflecting after a class at Teachers College and a long day at my desk at Columbia, I would have just returned from Spain, exhausted and exhilarated from a year of teaching English to 2nd graders and living in a rural, coastal town quietly distanced from the epicenter of this global financial meltdown.

It’s incredible to me how much single decisions shape our lives, and even more so how those decisions are rarely made on the impact they will have on our lives long-term. Instead, they are often made by prioritizing one tiny factor on which they hinge: a friend in town who we could always spend more time with, the immediate appeal of a higher salary, the weighing of two options when each should be considered independently, the fleeting priorities we think we will live by indefinitely. Our daily lives are defined by these individual components that we consider in isolation, though they collide in every moment to build the beginning and end of our days, the thoughts that preoccupy us before sleep, the frameworks with which we understand our purpose.

As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, I am one of the floaters. I do not have a predefined path or even a clear, distant end goal—instead I have diverse interests, competing priorities, and at times an inability to balance rational thinking with emotional investment. As a result, the individual factors of a decision play heavily in my selection; without a clearly defined purpose, I rely on the sub-components to understand my choices.

After graduating from college, I spent the following summer weighing two options: accept a one-year position with the Spanish government, imparting my native tongue on youngsters in a small town, or begin employment at a prestigious university in a global city, in a position requiring an ironically vague specialization and carrying an equally vague indication of where I could go from there. I picked the latter, partially because I thought that if I picked the former, I would spend the next summer engaging in a similar decision-making process, having spent a year doing something fun but not career-advancing, engaging but not necessarily skill-imparting. To prevent a wasted year, as it seemed at the time, I opted for the safer, more standard choice of immediate salaried employment in New York City.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen when I started this real life, full-time job. I couldn’t fathom being there for long, nor could I imagine where I might go next. After learning the ropes for a few weeks, I began to apply my old patterns of behavior to this new situation. I sought immediate advancement, rapid and incremental change, and new challenges. I scoured job postings without any sense of what I was looking for—I wanted significance, I wanted growth, I wanted a change of scene. I wanted agency over my own status. For a year and six months now, I have remained in this position, changing projects, acquiring new responsibilities, building relationships. I frequently wonder what my days would look like had I gone to Spain or taken a risk or chosen a challenge over safety. I look at the graduate program I’ve committed myself to, a spin-off of my job and an excuse for keeping it, and measure out the months until I’m through with this phase of my life. Yet in all these daydreams, in every calculation, the next destination remains unapparent.

Though I believe in the power of individuals to overcome obstacles and remedy effects of poor decisions, I’m cautious about this next one. Each step we take as young adults plunging forward into the world shapes and defines us—what happens if the next step poorly defines me? What if I place too much weight on the individual pieces of a decision without understanding the greater implications? What if I’m unable to holistically, strategically, wholeheartedly understand what I truly want to do?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

I’ve been thinking a lot about change and the contexts in which we engage in this process. Change, of course, is not a measurement but more of an infinite continuum. The seasons change, people change, we make change, we live through change.

If everything changed all the time, we wouldn’t know how to behave. Organization is essential to our society making progress. Maybe that’s why we keep ending up in the very same kinds of situations that we’ve staged revolutions and decades of counter-force against. It sometimes makes me wonder whether our world is just on auto-pilot cycling through forced changes. How much of an impact do our maneuvers really have? As T.S. Eliot wrote, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

Yet T.S. Eliot’s contributions to thinking on change weren’t all grim resignations to everything returning to its natural course, despite the disrupting fluctuations we inflict. Eliot also wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

How can we read this through a lens of understanding the paradox of change?

The example I almost always use is education. Having lost significant portions of their endowments and braced for even greater losses in the coming years, private universities, in the face of this immense disruption to carefully balanced finances, are being encouraged to take risks. Marketing consultants and politicians alike are telling them to engage in unprecedented innovation and exhibit creative and forward-thinking leadership. What is the goal of this direction? Is it to seek stability in the face of utter uncertainty? Or, is it to take the lowest point in recent economic history as an opportunity to instigate reforms that would have previously been unimaginably bold?

It’s unlikely that anything that happens now in direct response to the economic crisis, at least in terms of education, will have a profound impact on the way we understand and implement education as an institution in this country. If history holds true, this is one bump in the ongoing cycle of ups and downs, reforming previous reforms by returning to the reforms that came ever before them. But what if Eliot is telling us something—what if this time of economic concern is our exploration, this is our learning journey, and at the end of it, no matter whether our system looks the same or the battle we fought seems to have been in vain, we have gained a greater understanding of how we and our institutions work? Through creativity, innovation, and leadership, we can take meaningful steps towards a more in-depth, comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of our long-lasting institutions and the way we interact with them, and maybe one day, we will find the tiny pinhole in the cycle, and we will know, for the first time, what to do.

Mathilda Is

Facebook and the rest of the Web 2.0 world have changed a lot of things, revolutionizing the way we communicate and how we maintain our social networks. To keep up, we are living dual lives. We constantly interrupt our engagement in the physical world that surrounds us by logging on to this massive other galaxy, accessed through the tiniest pieces of equipment and existing somewhere that no one has ever really been, a place where we remotely build and maneuver representations of ourselves.

There’s been a lot of talk about the social network side of this whole phenomenon. I spend more than enough time thinking about how to appropriately merge my real life exchanges with what are quickly becoming the social norms of the e-world. Should I “friend” that person I just met? If I friend him too soon, will he think I’m weird? If I wait, will he forget me?

Though at times eliciting confusion, the social functions of these relatively new internet communities are unfolding fairly straight-forwardly. But what about their impact on self-perception? Facebook and its step-child, Twitter, have changed the way I think about myself on a moment-to-moment basis. The Facebook “status” feature, the sole component of sites like Twitter, invites people to state not just what they are doing at that particular moment, but also what they’re thinking about, what they need people to know, and what they want people to wonder about.

This “status” indicator has disturbingly permeated my life. I find myself walking down the street thinking, “Mathilda is going to the grocery store. Mathilda is very pleased with her grades. Mathilda is so happy that winter is ending.” My thoughts, these very personalized bits (most of which I never utter), are transferred into the third-person for easy digestion by friends, colleagues, and lots of other people who I barely even know, whether I ever even post them on Facebook or not. By constantly conjugating my train of thought, I’m directing the timbre of my own self-perception for another audience.

And so it goes: Mathilda is thinking about Paris. Mathilda is avoiding the question. Mathilda wonders why we can’t just talk face-to-face.

I want to take a step back. What are all the things that we’re not saying on these sites? And for all the things we are saying, why are we so willingly and excessively disclosing them? This constant status update is part and parcel of the transformation of social networking and the reframing of communications into instant headlines, but how much does this venture into how we define ourselves individually?

Mathilda is walking home wondering.

Remembering John Updike

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

Published January 28, 2009 in the New York Times

Remembering Structure in Progress

I’m so happy to have come across this recent article by David Brooks. In October, I wrote a piece for Oberlin.edu on the value of an Oberlin education. I wrote about how Oberlin equips its students to be fearless thinkers, to be innovative, to affirm that there is endless knowledge to gain. In this ode to Oberlin, I neglected to explore context, and to question whether Oberlin prepares its students to be all of these things while navigating the institutional frameworks that define our society.

I’ve talked a lot already about what it means for a school to prepare its students for the real world. This point comes close to home for me because I’ve never felt fully equipped to work within the institutions that shape the structure of my life. Whether this is a fault of the educational institutions I attended or my own is not really relevant—what does matter is, did Oberlin do the best that it could to build my awareness of institutional persistence? Did it appropriately prioritize individualized agendas and critical, innovative thinking against the way our world actually, mechanically, works?

When I started at Teachers College, I had a general sense of the kinds of things I would learn and the arguments I could expect to hear in the classroom. What I didn’t expect was to encounter readings by Tyack and others that remind us of the immense challenges of educational reform based on the permanence of our institutions. As recent college graduates with fire in our eyes and passion in our hearts, former teachers empowered by too many years of lacking power in their schools, and mid-career changers seeking a new spark, we are buzzing with thoughts we think have never been uttered before. We are scathingly, unforgivingly critical of the very system that brought us to where we are, picking apart the details of a school day, the educational units that define and bind a degree, the notion that children sit in a room together to learn. Yet as one apt writer once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Institutional theorists, those brave, seemingly negative souls, strive to bring us back to the base, to remind us that the system just doesn’t change as much as we think it will. Radicalism may be what it takes to see the change we need, but the change we need might not come from a total restructuring of the institution of education itself.

David Brooks’ words offer an important reminder. “In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us.” He continues:

“As we go through life, we travel through institutions—first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do…New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve.”

At the end of his article, Brooks calls for renewed faith in these institutions. In a way, he’s telling us not to bite the hand that feeds us. These institutions are here to stay—just as a writer derives her argument from engaging in another’s and a teacher structures her lessons around the core curriculum that has shaped millions of students before hers, we live in our world through constant engagement with the past and the present and the future via these institutional mechanisms that contain our interactions. Our institutions don’t ask us for complete conformity; they ask us to acknowledge the progress of our ancestors and to pass on a usable framework to those that follow us. In doing so, they allow us to continue forward, learning ever onward, finding comfort and strength in consistency and in our ability to critically, thoughtfully, and wisely understand where we stand against where we have been and where we could be.