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From a press release by the City: 

The Fort Worth City Council will conduct a citywide town hall meeting to discuss the modern streetcar study at 7 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Fort Worth Convention Center, 1201 Houston St.

The town hall, announced during the unveiling of a streetcar exhibit on Seventh Street, will help the City Council decide whether the study moves into its third phase. The third phase includes preliminary engineering and an environmental assessment, and finalizing the finance plan for the recommended starter route.

Free parking is available in the Commerce Street parking garage, located between 13th and 14th streets.

For more information, visit the Fort Worth Modern Streetcar Study webpage.

 If you want to know what the proposed modern streetcar for Fort Worth looks like, or if you want to see the excitement it’s generated:

If you want to support Fort Worth having this kind of quality infrastructure, come to a townhall meeting

This Thursday:

• 7 p.m. – Modern Streetcar Town Hall; Fort Worth Convention Center Ballroom, 1201 Houston St. 

Thanks to Fortworthology for finding the streetcar unvieling video — visit them for complete coverage of the fight to get modern streetcars for the city.

What problem? You ask. Well, not the need for Education Reform. To tell you the truth I think the Education Reform movement may be no more than a red herring to distract worthy people from the real issues that are facing this country. Education has to reform constantly, but it is evolving, and as one of my old friends used to tell me when I’d get upset about some triffle, “there is no emergency.”

The Problem is the decay of freedom and autonomy for Americans, and perhaps for people all over the world. Charles Hugh Smith has an angle on it, and I found many of his ideas about where the U.S. economy went wrong to be simple to understand and helpful. My own take on the Problem is that it has to do with decades of the powerful consolidating their privileges through the use of contracts and top-down government and administration. Focused on pop culture and amusements, the middle class has allowed its prerogatives (stuff such as moms staying home with small children and secure marriages bolstered by men who have secure jobs to provide for their families; safe communities where children play outside, local governments which listen to citizens, a reasonable expectation that if you get sick a medical professional will take care of you and you won’t go bankrupt) slip away.  Can we ever get them back? The Tea Party has an agenda for doing so, though I do not really see how their project proposes to turn things around. At least they see what is wrong and that is a start.

What is actually required? Well, I hate to say this but I think a graphic organizer on the true state of income inequality for Americans is helpful:

No, I am not actually suggesting we raise taxes on the rich. We need to change the laws that allowed this travesty to occur. What do I think should be done? A quick list would include:

1. Promote American manufacture of goods to promote work for Americans and stop bringing in so much from China; make laws that put family farms on an equal footing with agribusiness and let American individuals take back the land.

2. Economic incentives and/or community support for parents and parenting. No one talks about all the economic and social support Finnish parents receive and what that means for the wellbeing of their kids; they somehow think Finnish schools are doing the heavy lifting. Don’t make me laugh. Parents are the critical marker for child wellbeing. We need to help parents, and yet I know of no serious discussion on the web about how we can support parents and improve child wellbeing in America. Parent, save yourself! is the attitude. That may be “fair” but it’s not working.

4. Get some kind of control of the fees we are being charged for banking, utilities, insurance, and health care. Every law should be assessed for its effect on the middle and working class, and if the effect is negative, the law should not be passed by our “representatives.” As I said, I do not advocate raising taxes, but I do think the fees are grossly unfair and in need of government regulation by citizen committees which answer to the people.

5.  Make sure that all Americans have access to health care.  Obamacare may not be the answer but at least he was willing to do something about a crisis for the poorer among working America that no one else seemed concerned about.

6. Begin to address the crime situation in our cities. Crime is eating away at the wellbeing of young America and I know this firsthand because I work in city schools. I can’t believe we spend so much thought on “education reform” and almost none on “citizenship reform.” Why is this? Probably because no one has the slightest idea what to do about crime, or possibly they do and the powers that be don’t want it found out.

Those are my ideas. I don’t know how to start enacting them except for writing this blog post. However, I do believe that the everyday well-wishers of America need to stop wasting time on things that don’t make our children’s lives better, such as discussions of pop culture, technology, and education reform.  Our best people need to talk about real human wellbeing issues, not test scores and whether NCLB is fair.

Roger Waters: The Wall Live
American Airlines Center, Dallas, Texas
November 21, 2010

Review by Dean Cassella, Ph.D.

I must admit, dear readers, that although my aesthetic tastes tend toward the aristocratic, I have a populist streak that rears its head, from time to time.  So when I heard that Roger Waters, the former leader of Pink Floyd, was touring the Americas and Europe with a new version of Floyd’s operatic The Wall, my interest was more than a bit piqued.  I remember well when, as a wee lad growing up in Los Angeles, Pink Floyd unpacked their unprecedentedly huge multi-media live rendition of the massively successful LP in our city.  The staging was so elaborate that performances only occurred in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Dortmund, Germany.  I was not really into latter-day Pink Floyd at the time (my tastes running more towards The Beatles), but one of my friends, under the influence of his older brother and cousin, was, and consequently had the requisite chaperone to see one of the shows.  Years later, as the shows grew in stature in pop music lore, my friend’s happy condition of having been there increased his social cache, while the rest of us, like Tantalus, could only lament having been so near, and yet so far . . . 

Accordingly, Sunday evening’s performance took on the role of filling a small void in my adolescence.  Despite the hype, the show lived up to my expectations, and was arguably the most impressive multi-media musical presentation I have ever seen (and probably ever will). The old Pink Floyd was a pioneer in creating such productions, and accordingly is part of the theatrical trend started by Richard Wagner in the mid-nineteenth century.  This is Gesamptkunstwerk (or Total Art Work) at its grandest.  And although modern opera productions attempt and succeed (often brilliantly) in pulling off such fare (especially with the Ring), none have the resources or audience to pull off something this elaborate, try though the folks at Bayreuth might.

Roger Waters, who recently turned 67, still clearly possesses the energy to perform under touring conditions, and even more importantly, his voice can still carry his songs for over two hours of performance time.  Supporting him was a large backup band of seasoned professional studio musicians who carried the show almost without a hitch.  One could also say that the audience functioned as quasi backup singers, because one could hear the audience singing along with Waters throughout the show. 

The idea for The Wall grew out of Waters’ disaffection with performing live Pink Floyd shows, after the band achieved superstardom.  He says that he felt alienated from the audience members in the big sports stadium venues, and wished that he could build a wall around himself when performing.  Besides that fact that the music counts among the best to come out of the seventies, the concept of literally building a wall around the band during a live performance proved to be a catalyst for some strikingly innovative musical theater.  The lyrics largely concern the interior state of a severely disaffected rock star, named Pink, who psychologically builds a wall around himself. 

Waters was also greatly disturbed by the mass hysteria that inevitably accompanied Pink Floyd stadium shows, which to him vaguely resembled fascist party rallies (in this context, one must keep in mind that Waters’ father died while serving in World War II).  In keeping with previous incarnations of The Wall, this show contains some visuals that resemble fascist-type paraphernalia. The “fascist rally” towards the end is one of the most successful experiments in performance art ever created.  While even the daftest of fans could not help but catch the irony of the lyrics of the anthem In the Flesh (imagine a “one world” rock star type singing about lining up gays, Jews and blacks to be shot!), it is virtually impossible not to get swept up in the excitement generated therein. 

The whole experience amounts to a type of experiment in applied archeology, as one experiences the feelings that many who attended actual Nazi rallies had, even as they intellectually rejected the content of the message.

            One of the highlights of the show was the acoustic ballad Mother. 

Prior to playing it, Waters addressed the audience, telling them that the accompanying visuals were a film of him performing the song at the original shows in 1981.  Other visuals in the song included shots of a video camera playing the role of “Big Mother” with the audience, and slogans in a variety of languages such as “trust us,” and “everything’s going to be ok.” 

A constant theme of the visuals in the performance is the idea that war is the destruction of masses for the benefit of the powerful.  One of the most touching moments was the inclusion of photos, submitted by fans, of soldiers who died while serving.  These created a mosaic on the stage wall, all to great effect.

By the show’s end, Pink is put on trial a condemned to be “exposed before [his] peers,” and hence the wall comes crashing down, quite literally, on the stage.

In sum, this was one of the finest and most satisfying live performances that I have ever seen.  If you are hanging on the fence about going to one of the subsequent performances, take the plunge—you will not regret it.

We are going to grandma’s for thanksgiving. This means we don’t have to cook any turkey, any stuffing, any turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, none of that. I have, however, been asked to make pies. “As many as possible,” my mother said.

Of course, I don’t want to spend an entire day making pies during my fall break.  I am, within the family, known for pies, especially the cherry pie. But today I’d rather clean the house, sew, whatever. Or get my daughter Pia, who’s home from college, to help me clean out the garage so we can put the Mazda Miata in for the winter. Or even lesson plan. I’m a teacher now, I no longer want to prove to prove I’m the greatest pie cook. The kids, on the other hand, have long memories. They know I can make more than a couple simple pies if I want to, and if I’m off this week, and don’t have to cook a turkey, why not make more than ever before? We had five or six last year …

This is what happened last night: I take out a piece of paper. I write down eight pies. The idea is to have a vote and decide which we are going to make. Maybe four or five.  The pies are Lemon Meringue, Cherry, Pumpkin, Chocolate, Apple, Blueberry, Peach Cobbler, and Pecan.  I take the votes. The three losers are pecan, blueberry, and pumpkin.

“We can’t really have Thanksgiving without pumpkin,” someone says.

“Or pecan,” says someone else.

My youngest daughter, who’s in fifth grade, begins to cry. Her selection was the blueberry pie, and she really, really, really wants us to make it. She will help! She promises!

“Let’s vote again,” I say. We vote again. The results are different, but the same: every pie is a sacred cow to someone. It’s getting late; I want to go to bed.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll try to make them all. I’ll start first thing in the morning. But you all have to help.” So that is my plan today. Wait for Pia to get up, then go down to the store, get the pie supplies, and start baking.

Following discussions on Twitter’s #edchat thread has brought me in contact with the ponderous “Education Reform” movement. I have read a number of blog posts about how to reform education, and as I do, I can’t help but remember our own Education Reform, that was our 12 years of home schooling.

It started out as a response to the 19-letters-of-the-alphabet debacle in Irvine, California. My oldest daughter was starting public kindergarten in a top district in the OC, and she was anxiously looking forward to learning to read. But, the teacher told us, she was really too young, at 5. They would not be teaching the whole alphabet, only the 19 most important letters …

Her maladaptation and unhappiness at this particular everyday elementary catapulted me into the realm of homeschoolers. And thus we started on a journey of discovery, learning, and yes, even exploration. The home schooling grade school years were some of the best times of my life, and both my daughters agree.

Then my son came along and broke up the school. You can read about our odyssey with him, dyslexia, and discipline issues here. In the years right after we moved to Texas, money became short, I needed to work, and I had to admit that home schooling wasn’t working, more than anything else because I no longer enjoyed doing it. This revelation was an unpleasant one. The title “homeschooling burnout” has been applied to many such situations, but really, it wasn’t burnout over time so much as overwhelming family responsibilies making it too difficult to enjoy the daily learning as we had.

The learning styles of my two sons were a big part of the difficulty. The troubles of the older have already been laid out. The younger, though quite academically capable, is a social learner who was bored with life at home. He wanted to be with other kids and he didn’t seem to get excited about learning for its own sake.  So we quit homeschooling, making us “failures” or even “infidels” in our homeschooling circle, especially since we put two children in the much-maligned public school.

My husband and I are products of the public school, and after years of trying to escape, the youngest children are in public school again (the older daughters are both in college).  But then all fires burn out at last, it’s said, and life has a way of repeating itself.

The education reform movement may be legit, but deep in my heart I find myself thinking it may just as easily be another cycle of the same ideas, revolving around in a circle … back to basics, creativity building, uniform curriculum, classical education, self directed education … they’ve all been tried and done and abandoned before.  Before it became edupunk, homeschooling was a viable and valid education option, by which Benjamin Franklin, George C. Patton, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Jane Austin were taught their skills.  The wheel goes around, and what was old and outdated becomes new.

I still feel a little sad to have left homeschooling behind. But teaching in a classroom has a whole different thrill to it. And anyway, “life is always right,” as some character in a Bollywood film would have it. I guess I would have to say that the truth is I don’t really believe in education reform in the same way anymore; I don’t believe the “holy grail” is out there. I believe in education diversity and freedom. And in that, I’m still in good status with the homeschooling movement.

I was at a dinner party on Saturday and happened to meet a home schooling mom. I had wanted to meet this woman, because she had founded a preschool in another state and I wanted to hear more about it. I asked about the school’s philosophy, and she told me it was all about kids learning by exploring.

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I do think exploration is a critical part of learning, and especially for the very young children. Perhaps this is a problem for my own students — not enough time to explore before starting school, then when they start they don’t have math facts and things like that internalized and they need to catch up.”

But that wasn’t it, she said. Kids of all ages learn best by exploring, not by being told. The method we use at our school, where the teacher introduces the lesson, the students observe than participate — what we call direct instruction — she didn’t agree with. Students should learn what they want to, and it should be important to them. If it’s not important, we should wait for it to be important.

I know that students need to have a connection to what they’re learning. And I’ve reached an age where I don’t argue at parties unless attacked. But as I looked at this earnest young woman I wondered, was it true? Was she really saying that my 22 inner citiy students should come into my classroom and explore what they want to learn and see how that goes with mastering the math TEKS (learning ojbectives) on the midyear exams?

Students don’t need to learn phonics, either it turns out. She said. “My daughters learned easily from reading to them, then they started reading themselves.”

I don’t whip out references to educational research at parties, not only because you can’t properly cite your source, but because educational research is often conflicting and bringing it up generally only muddies the water. But the research on phonics instruction is so clear I was amazed any educator is not yet aware of it.

“Surely they need to learn the 26 initial letter sounds of the alphabet?” I asked.

She shrugged. No phonics.  Of course, when you’re the wife of a college professor and you have intelligent, educationally inclined students, this kind of thing can work very well, perhaps better than traditional methods. It is, in a larger group setting, somewhat the way I was taught in California. The problem comes when you forget the students who will not learn this way, or write them off as “not important.”

In a public school, we need a balance. Some learning should be student directed, and some should be teacher led. Students have a lot of beautiful, wonderful ideas and these should be nurtured. On the other hand, math facts and phonics are rarely learned spontaneously by the students who need them most. It was clear from our conversation that my earnest young homeschooling aquaintance had never seen a severely dyslexic child, like my son, with whom I had to do extensive phonics and dictation drills to take him from non-reading and bring him up to grade level when he was ten years old.

“I am upset about this,” I told my husband when we got home. “Look at what she said!” My husband just smiled.

“She reminds me of you when you were at the height of homeschooling about twelve years ago. You had two very academically capable girls to teach and you believed a lot of the myths too.”

I didn’t want to hear that, but he is right. I decided to work on making the learning in my classroom more connected to the students’ interest. But I also know that sometimes, you’ve just go to teach basics if you want all the kids to keep up.  Doing explorational learning would be more fun for teachers, but it would certainly widen the gap between the highest and lowest students, and that’s really not fair.

From a Press Release by the City

City leaders and downtown visitors today got their first glimpse at something absent from Fort Worth streets for more than a generation – a streetcar.

Mayor Mike Moncrief – along with representatives from the Trinity River Vision Authority, The T and Fort Worth South – unveiled a streetcar at the corner of Seventh and Throckmorton streets. The streetcar, which will be open to the public daily through Nov. 26, is part of an effort to inform the public about new transportation opportunities in the city.

“When it comes to transportation,” Moncrief said, “There’s no such thing as ‘one size fits all’ … Before we even begin to think about laying rail, we must do our homework.”

Moncrief urged the public to visit the display and learn about streetcars in advance of a town hall meeting, scheduled for 7 p.m. Dec. 2 in the Fort Worth Convention Center Ballroom, 1201 Houston St.  

 ”As officials, [the City Council] had the privilege to visit other cities and get a closer look at modern streetcar systems,” Moncrief said. “This is a chance for the people of Fort Worth to visit, explore and formulate their own opinions about streetcars.” 

City Council approved the first two phases of a modern streetcar study in April, and will consider a resolution authorizing the third phase of the study at its Dec. 7 meeting, set for 7 p.m. at City Hall.

It started with a tweet that I came across on the #edchat thread on Twitter.com — this was posted by @cspezio: “You can see good teaching, hear good teaching, and feel good teaching as soon as you walk into a classroom — WELCOMING AND ENGAGING.

Don’t ask me why, perhaps it was the capital letters. But more likely it was the certainty of the comment, the idea that if @cspezeio came into my classroom, she would immediately assume she could know, perhaps by sense of smell, whether the kids were learning. This rubbed me wrong.  Quibbles:

1) What is “good” teaching? Did the post mean a good teacher at getting reading scores, citizenship, or classroom management?  You could be strong in one and not in the others …

2) Who could see, hear and feel good teaching? Other teachers? The principal? The superintendant? The math coach? The parents?

The very vagueness of the concept “good teaching” was part of the problem. @mbteach said this an excellent way when she tweeted: “I never call kids ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Why are we labeling ourselves this way?”

Meanwhile, I tweeted back to the original post:  Disagree about this. “You can hear, see and feel a pretty class with engaged students, but you can’t see whether they’re actually learning anything.”  And also: “Show me your teaching that you can feel, see and hear is “good” and I’ll show you my test scores.”

“Just because the students can regurgitate information and perform on a test doesn’t mean they learned” she shot back.

LOL. Well what does?  Call me old fashioned, but if my students don’t learn in a manner that is demonstrable in their ability to score well on tests, I feel they haven’t learned. The only people I expect to oppose tests in the abstract (many do oppose poorly written tests, but that’s different) are the dishonest and the incompetent. After all, what would be the motive to avoid having accurate information about student acheivement? The only one I can think of is, your students don’t have what me and my colleagues call “gain.”  That’s where students read, or master math or science objectives, better in June than when they arrived in September. And yes, we measure their gain a lot. If we don’t see gain in every student, we get worried. The only way you can see if they’ve got it is to test.

Meanwhile in my district, where I have worked for two years, I have yet to meet a teacher I truly thought was “bad.” Some were really strong, others were just getting by. But the “incompetent” teacher heard about in my childhood doesn’t exist where I work. The directives from above and the demands of our students dictate that survival itself indicates competence. 

As our union president said last year, “If you can teach in here, you can teach anywhere.” Maybe it’s different in New Jersey. But count me suspicious of the idea that you can walk into a classroom once and judge the teacher’s effectiveness, or calling tests “regurgitating information.”

News

Kevin Buchanan at Fortworthology reports on the ongoing struggle to keep the Fort Worth Streetcar dream alive http://fortworthology.com/2010/10/07/streetcars-and-the-culture-of-fort-worth/

Signs of the recession ending?  American Airlines recalls   employees:http://krld.cbslocal.com/2010/10/06/15752/

Current events

The MusicArt festival, focusing on Latino music, art and food is this weekend … reports Food and Fort Worth http://ripsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/10/musicarte-2010.html

More than mothers writes about Japanese garden festival http://morethanmothers.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/fall-festival-in-the-japanese-garden/

Culture

Signs of high idealism in the Queen City of the Plains from a guy who knows foreign languages – “We in Fort Worth face issues such as poverty, gang violence, abuse, drugs and high drop-out rates. We—in community, as cohumans and equals—must find solutions.  “  http://bmwooddell.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/first-person-plural/

Elieva reviews Diamonds in my Pocket, and talks about how space is organized as a cultural indicator http://blueeyebrowneye.com/2010/10/05/adopt-a-shelter-animal/

Service Pieces:

Frugal in Fort Worth links to free pumpkin stencils http://frugalinfortworth.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/free-pumpkin-carving-stencils-and-jack-o-lantern-pattern-ideas-over-60-free-downloads/

Brown Eye Blue Eye spotlights shelter animals http://blueeyebrowneye.com/2010/10/05/adopt-a-shelter-animal/

The Eclectic life mediates on Packrattery … http://thiseclecticlife.com/2010/10/07/kitchen-junk-drawer-organization/

Food:

Fort Worth Hole in the Wall reports that Bon Appetit voted Paris Coffee Shop’s pie one of the ten best in the Universe … not sure if I’m with them on this but here’s the story http://fortworthholeinthewall.blogspot.com/2010/09/paris-coffee-shop-best-pie-in-universe.html