Stop the Insanity

It’s FCAT week in Florida, which means several things:

1. A)vomiting elementary school students
   

2. B)stressed-out high schoolers
   

3. C)overtaxed teachers
   

4. D)all of the above
   

If you answered D, go to the head of the class. You see, when it’s standardized test week in the state of Florida, time slows (if not stops altogether), kids bail, and normally sane teachers kinda lose it a little. There’s just something fundamentally wrong with all learning grinding to a halt so we can genuflect at the altar of Scantrons and #2 pencils.

But frankly, as long as we have folks like the current occupant of that nice brick mansion in Tallahassee, Gov. Skeletor, and other acolytes of the test-’em-hard-and-test-’em-often faith pulling the strings, learning will take a permanent back seat to numbers, spreadsheets, and charts. There’s nothing wrong with testing when it’s used to check progress and plan, but when test scores become the way we pit teachers and schools against each other, the kids lose.

This year, my students have lost three full weeks of instruction because of required testing practice. What could I have done in those three weeks? Taught another play. Analyzed a documentary. Directed seminars and discussions. Conducted two full sets of individual writing conferences. But I didn’t, because my kids were testing--and since they knew these tests didn’t “count,” they weren’t taking them seriously. Any parent with teenagers at home can tell you that if they haven’t bought in, they won’t bring much out, and that’s as true of standardized tests as it is taking out the garbage or cleaning that pit of a bedroom.

Michelle is Rhee-diculous. Bill ought to close the Gates to the giant testing companies who are the only entities truly benefiting from all of these new testing requirements. Last weekend, I spent two days in a group of 300+ master teachers who will conduct week-long trainings at seven different locations this summer. Those 300 teachers will reach roughly 2,ooo participants at each seminar, which makes fourteen thousand teachers who aren’t, as the common “teachers are lazy” meme suggests, sitting around doing nothing all summer. Don’t get me started on all the teachers who give up a week to score AP exams or who attend AP institutes or who plan for next year or do curriculum writing or...let me quit before I blow a gasket.

The point is, why aren’t the powers that be rounding up master teachers of all stripes--from all grade levels and all subjects, including the VITAL arts and humanities courses--and asking them what works to improve things? Oh, and while they’re at it, they can apply all the money they’re currently throwing toward the testing companies to do something substantive about children who live in poverty. I guarantee that’ll do much more for educational success than all the Scantrons in the world.

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Swamp Thing

After a weekend in California (where it was raining and chilly in “Sunny San Diego”), mimi can’t begin to say how happy she is to be back in her Central Florida swamp. The first time I ever flew west, I spent much of the time with my forehead pressed to the window, watching the landscape change from brilliant Southern green to hard-baked desert brown. After decades of Florida summers, punctuated by our typical late-afternoon thunderstorms, the arid California July was a revelation.

But may I just say that arid California weather coupled with two days of hotel meeting rooms and hours trapped in an airplane have wreaked absolute havoc on my sinuses? I now understand how Southern belles maintain their lovely skin--they aren’t having to slather themselves with moisturizer that seems to evaporate into nothingness. See, Southern women get plenty of moisture every time they step outside. We basically live in a giant terrarium!

Emerging from baggage claim at the Orlando International Airport after my trip, I could practically feel my skin sucking up the water. I felt like a walking tree frog--minus the sucker pads and green skin. Let me just say, I’m happy to endure Florida’s August weather (temps in the 90s, humidity in the 90s) if it means I don’t have to dry out and crack.

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Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!

mimi isn’t big on April Fool’s Day pranks (although the rubber band around the sink sprayer trick has proven reliable for years now), but foolery is something else entirely. Spending four years as the designated Court Jester at my college’s annual Christmas Madrigal Dinner didn’t happen by accident, you know. Neither was being cast as Puck in a freshman year production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Guess I was just born to wear jingle shoes and a floppy hat--or, in Puck’s case, horns. Enjoy the foolery--and watch out for that sink sprayer!

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Spring Break

Four denizens of Chez mimi with no alarm clocks to set. Three new books waiting to be read. Two bare feet. One top down on Inga, the convertibeetle. Spring Break at last!

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The Bed List (Late Night Edition)

DVRs were made for faces like these. Since mimi is famous in her circle of friends for her “social narcolepsy,” aka, falling dead asleep at 9 pm while sitting upright, the DVR is her direct line to membership in Craig Ferguson’s Robot Skeleton Army. How many things can we adore about Craig aside from that lovely Glaswegian accent? Those twinkly eyes! The cheekiness of his monkey! The things IN HIS PANTS. He’s hilarious and smart and funny and sexy and all mimi can say is that she’d like to DVR life and get him out of those pants. (Did she say THAT?? Oh, yes, she did!)

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Girls' Night In

Tomorrow is the church Men’s Retreat, so Mr. Man will be spiriting Frick away for an overnight and a cookout. While they’re shivering in a pup tent in 30-odd degree weather, Frack and I will be getting our X chromosome on.

Admittedly, mimi doesn’t stray far into the female end of the spectrum. I somehow missed the Cute Shoes and Darling Accessories alleles in my genetic profile. Pink has never been a favorite color--unless it’s on something from Lilly Pulitzer, and then I’m all over it. But that’s my latent preppy side emerging, not my inner Barbie. mimi loves to argue politics and geeky stuff and once humbled a room full of male Mensa members by correctly identifying and applying the infield fly rule. mimi was so determined not to cripple her daughter with gender stereotyping that she pitched a hissy in three different stores until she could find a little girl’s two-wheeler that wasn’t hosed down in estrogen, i.e. pink with white tires. Basically, we don’t do girly at Chez mimi.

mimi will admit, however, to loving two hugely feminine indulgences (some would say necessities): massages and pedicures. So while the boys are freezing their collective hineys off and shooting at things, we gals will be relaxing in the foot spa and planning a movie trip to something that would make my son gag. Then I’ll go watch my sporty girl kick some butt in softball. We’re Southern, after all. There’s plenty of steel in our magnolia.

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Orange Blossom Special

The key scene in Marcel Proust’s À la recherce du temps perdu, or Remembrance of Things Past, is the madeleine episode, where the smell and taste of a cookie transports the narrator back to his childhood. (You can see a cartoon version of this famous French scene in the Pixar film Ratatouille). This happens to me every spring when the orange trees bloom.

When we first moved to Central Florida, we moved into what was left of an orange grove. The houses on our street had been carved out of a larger grove, as had all the houses in the subdivisions on either side of us. Every house had a tree or two (ours were a Parson Brown and a Valencia), but the best thing about our unfenced yard was that it nudged up against an undeveloped lot. That tiny remnant of grove became a playground. One tree, fitted with seats by neighborhood children long gone off to college, filled with friends as we chatted away humid summer afternoons. Windfall oranges became the ammunition in grove wars that would break out, boys vs. girls. The boys nearly always won, since one of them would invariably pick up a half-rotted specimen that exploded in a smear on some unsuspecting opponent, driving us all out of the trees and into the nearest swimming pool.

Orange trees are unique because they are the only fruit trees which bear and blossom at the same time. The winter citrus harvest coincides with the arrival of the orange blossoms, and there is no scent quite like it on earth. We’d walk home from school in a haze of fragrance, the smell would hang so heavy in the humid air. In mid-spring, you could catch a whiff of hot orange once the packing plants in Apopka and Zellwood began their work for Minute Maid.

These days, the groves have given way to office parks and subdivisions. You can no longer smell the heavy warmth wafting from the juice-processing plants in north Orange County, for they have all closed down. U.S. Highway 441, the Orange Blossom Trail, reminds us of all we’ve lost now that its shoulders are crowded with strip malls instead of rows on rows of trees. Still, our little backyard groves--the ones that survived the Christmas freeze of 1989, at least--still burst into blossom in the spring, transporting me to a time when my biggest worries were grades on a report card and a perfect day was spent perched in the boughs of a tree.

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