Josh and Rebecca’s girl, birth order book.

Introducing our beautiful newest Kelly family member. Names coming soon!

UPDATE: We just spoke with Josh, and their daughter will be named Lucille (Lucy) Virginia Kelly.

ORIGINAL POST: It’s a girl!

Our sister-in-law Rebecca delivered a beautiful baby girl at about 9:30 this morning.  Everyone is doing fine, and Josh has already sent pictures.

Josh and Rebecca already have two children, Jacob, who turns 11 in a couple of weeks, and Sarah, who will be nine in early May.

In a karmic irony, Josh has exactly replicated the birth order, but not gender, of his generation.  Shaun is 11 years older than him, while Dunreith has nine years on her 6’5″ “little brother.”

One’s order in the family hierarchy has a real impact on our identities, according to Kevin Leman, author of The Birth Order Book: Why You Are The Way You Are.

Leman explains that one’s gender, order, and the amount of time in between one’s siblings, are important variables.

Oldest children, like me, tend to like structure and be responsible rules-followers, middle children like my brother Mike tend to wonder about their place in the world, while youngest siblings like my brother Jon tend to be more loosey-goosey, creative and self-oriented.

Large gaps in time, such as Josh had as a child, and his new daughter will, too, can mean that, although the younger child has siblings, they grew up in more of an only-child type existence.

All this of course will unfold in time.  For now, we celebrate the joyful news of our family’s latest arrival and look forward to meeting her in a few short hours.

RIP, Jaime Escalante, Jay Mathews’ Biography

Legendary teacher Jaime Escalante has died after battling cancer.

Jaime Escalante, the fabled teacher immortalized by Edward James Olmos in the film Stand and Deliver, has died.

Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews wrote an admiring biography of Escalante that is worth reading.

The book traces Escalante’s training as an engineer in his native country, his gradual path toward becoming a high school teacher at East Los Angeles’ Garfield High School, where he fought for, introduced, and led students to excellent scores in, the Advanced Placement Calculus class.

He is a colorful character.  Mathews writes about Escalante’s ongoing battles with other educators, the nearly unconditional support he received from Principal Henry Gradillas, and his constant efforts to convince students they had the brains to achieve at the same level as their wealthier and whiter counterparts.

Linda Asato, a former student of Escalante’s, said he would often spend up to half the class giving the students a pep talk.

Mathews also explains how Escalante accumulated a wealth of teaching materials and equipment by swooping in whenever a colleague was leaving.

The book also explores the controversial interaction with the Educational Testing Service, which questioned the students’ stellar results on the test.  The movie portrays the issue as one of racism, and the book gives it more texture.  Mathews does note that Escalante had a specific teaching method which increased the chances that students would make the same type of mistake, and he includes statements from several of the students that they did cheat-statements the students later retract.

Mathews also makes the points both that the quality of the classes became harder to maintain as the number of students taking the test expanded and the students studied less vigorously, and that teachers in other departments also started teaching Advanced Placement classes at which Garfield students succeeded.

This challenging of disbelief and shattering of barriers may be one of Escalante’s most enduring legacies.

I learned the news from one of Escalante’s former students, Yamil, who commented on this blog and says we should honor this great teacher.

I couldn’t agree more.

Heavy going, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross On Death and Dying.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' work can be helpful during these trying times.

Life’s been a heavy slog recently.

Between my father-in-law’s final days and death on Friday, Mom’s being in the hospital for two weeks due to congestive heart failure, and trying to help Aidan during a particularly intense part of junior year, I’ve become more familiar than ever before with the concept of the sandwich generation.

At times, I’ve felt like a big piece or roast beef, or tempeh, for the vegetarian-minded.

I’m very fortunate to belong to two families with plenty of love, support and strength. Dunreith and her family showed tremendous compassion and unity in making Marty’s final days as peaceful as possible.  As I mentioned yesterday, my brothers Mike and Jon have done yeoman work with Mom during her hospitalization and since she came home on Sunday.

Back in Brookline, Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot’s The Good High School.

Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot's The Good High School includes a chapter about Brookline High School, my alma mater.

I’m back in my hometown of Brookline, spending time with Mom, who just came home yesterday from Beth Israel Hospital dealing with the two-week fallout from congestive heart failure.

My brothers Mike and Jon have done a magnificent job of tending to Mom’s needs in the hospital, advocating on her behalf, connecting with her and starting to figure out next steps of care for her.

I got into town yesterday afternoon and felt a surge of emotion as I drove by Cypress Park and saw Brookline High School, my alma mater, looming in the distance. 

It’s been 27 years since I graduated, and somehow, at that moments, those years felt like a lifetime ago, and I understand better than I had before the literature of middle-aged characters returning home and being reminded rudely of time’s inevitable passage.

RIP, Marty Kelly

My father-in-law Martin Kelly died yesterday at age 77.

My father-in-law Martin Kelly died yesterday a week shy of his 78^{th birthday.}

We all knew this day was coming, but somehow you’re never quite prepared for the loss of someone as vital and memorable as Marty.

He was born in Pittsfield, but was a Springfield man through and through.  Reared in Hungry Hill, he graduated from Classical High School in 1950, and was AIC class of 1954.  Had my mother-in-law Helen not insisted, Marty might well have happily spent the rest of his life at 2197 Wilbraham Road in the city of his childhood.

He loved hotdogs and beans, and was a steak and potatoes man, heavy on the salt, even after his septuple bypass in 1998. He treasured his afternoon Dewar’s and Russell Stover jellybeans, even when they stuck to his teeth. He dressed nattily and wore his hats and his ties well.

More Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol's commitment and stories impressed my brother Jon yesterday.

I just talked with my brother Jon, who said the screening of his video about youth violence at Roosevelt University was well received.

But he seemed more excited to talk about Jonathan Kozol, the 73-year-old author and activist born into privilege who has fought for social justice for close to a half century.

I wrote yesterday about A Death at an Early Age and The Shame of the Nation.

Here are some other Kozol books:

Savage Inequalities looks at the vast inequities in school funding that stem from many states’ primary reliance on local property tax.  Kozol portrays suburban communities like Wilmette, where New Trier High School is located, and poor communities like East St. Louis.  

Not to toot our horn too much, but we did do a project a few years ago here at the Reporter where we found three interlocking levels of inequality that stem from the heavy reliance on local property tax.  

The first is the one that Kozol describes, which is that wealthy communities generate far more money and have more control over the money that comes in, than poorer school districts.

The second level is that poor districts tax themselves at far higher rates than their more affluent counterparts, yet generate just a fraction of the money for that far higher property tax rate.  East St. Louis, for example, taxes itself at more than 7 percent and generates about $1,000 per pupil, while a district in Lake Forest has a property tax rate of 1.3 percent and generates more than $20,000 per kid.

The third level is related to the second. It is that the higher property tax rates serves as a disincentive for businesses to invest in poorer communities.  While residential property tax on the whole constitutes the largest share of property tax revenue, the gap between commercial property collected in wealthy and poor districts is even greater.

This means, in essence, that poor districts can never catch up to richer ones. 

Rachel and Her Children was published in the late 80s and is Kozol’s look at the experience of  a homeless woman and her family.  As with much of his work, he draws on the experiences of individual people and families to illustrate the larger social structures.

Ordinary Resurrections is a paean to the South Bronx neighborhood, and the heart and resilience of the children who live there.  I found this book a bit less dogmatic than some of Kozol’s other work, and thus enjoyed it a little more than the others.

Thoughts? Agreements?  Disagreements?  All are welcome.

Jonathan Kozol, Jon Lowenstein and Carlos Ortiz at Roosevelt’s Mansfield Institute

Jonathan Kozol speaks about his latest book at Roosevelt University today after my brother Jon show a film he made.

“You have to go to the place of pain and look in the eyes of the people … the nation has cheated for so long,” author and activist Jonathan Kozol declared to a rapt audience at an afternoon tea at Roosevelt University.

In brief autobiographical remarks, the trim and brown-haired Kozol, now in his early 70s, bobbed from side to side as he shared the origins of his now 45-year commitment to social justice.

It is a journey that began drenched in privilege.

Holding a silver watch in his right hand, Kozol, who wore a dark blue suit with a red pen peeking out of the pocket, a pair of blue sneakers and his trademark John Lennon-style glasses, explained that his father urged him to attend Harvard University rather than Princeton.

The dean of admissions was a classmate of Kozol’s father, and he made a persuasive case.  “Talk about affirmative action,” he said as the audience chuckled approvingly.

His next stop was Oxford, where he began, but did not finish, the work he had set out to do as a Rhodes Scholar.  Feeling constrained with the venerable institution’s definition of English literature as ending in 1832-Kozol had wanted to write about W.H. Auden-he set off for Paris.

Within the first week, he had bumped physically into Richard Wright. Shortly after, he met William Styron and James “Jimmy” Baldwin.

Upon returning to Boston, he went to Roxbury and got hired to teach fourth grade-an experience that served as the basis for his National Book Award-winning debut, A Death At An Early Age.

Toward the end of year, offended by the use of a saccharine poem by Gwendolyn Brooks to stand for black literature, Kozol introduced his students to Langston Hughes’ From Mother to Child and Dream Deferred.

He was fired the next day for “curricular deviation,” and then hired the following week by the federal government to work on curriculum development.

Kozol will be giving a public presentation later today about The Shame of the Nation, his most recent book, at an event sponsored by Roosevelt’s Mansfield Institute. Kozol’s thesis is that, 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, America has restored its system of educational apartheid, but with the insidious twist of commemorating the nation’s commitment to integration and equality.

“See all the progress we’ve made in 40 years,” he asked wryly after saying he had heard about a proposal to raise CPS class sizes to 37 students.  “It’s as bad under Obama as it was under LBJ.”

He hastened to add that he “had worked for Obama, of course.”

Before Kozol’s speech, my brother Jon and his friend and colleague Carlos Ortiz will also present a video they have made about youth violence in Chicago.

Jon and Carlos collaborated earlier on “Violent Realities,” a photographic show hosted at the Gage Gallery that featured Jon’s color work from Guatemala and Carlos’ black-and-white images from Chicago’s South and West Sides.

I’ve seen a trailer for the video, and can say confidently that it’s powerful stuff.  People who attend the event are in for a treat, if a heavy one, from three talented and dedicated artists and spirits.

Aidan’s History Paper, David Halberstam’s The Fifties

 

David Halberstam's tome about the 1950s is typically gripping reading.

 Aidan’s been rich in paper assignments these days. Last night, we worked on a research paper for his history class.

He’s looking at the social changes in America during the 1960s through the lense of music, youth protests against the war in Vietnam and the fight to end segregation.

In the paper’s first section, he’s worked to establish the behavioral baseline against which the change should be measured.  Aidan’s arguing that the 1950s were a period of comparative tranquility, docility and conformity. 

He’s drawn heavily on David Halberstam’s The Fifties, a comprehensive overview of the decade that also led to a PBS series by the same name.

Halberstam is a journalism hero of mine. The range of his subjects, depth of reporting, writing ability and productivity each are extraordinarily impressive.  Put together in one person, they are nearly awe-inspiring. 

At a memorial event for him shortly after his untimely death in 2007, Alex Kotlowitz spoke both about Halberstam’s generosity to him as a young writer and how The Best and the Brightest was passed around like a sacred text by war correspondents in Iraq after the recent war began in 2003.

Halberstam came of age during the Fifties, and while you can feel his passion for each of the books he has written, I picked up a special love for the decade of his adolescence.

Readers of The Coldest Winter, his final book, will find his look at the Korean War less thorough than that tome.  But that’s not the purpose of this work, which takes us through the years of McCarthy, Truman, Eisenhower, MacArthur, the rise of suburbia, the integration of Little Rock, and the ascent of television.

Part of Halberstam’s genius was his ability to synthesize huge gobs of information and then convey them in ways that transmitted what he wanted to know while also giving the reader a flavor of the times and the people who made them.

Aidan will soon be done with his paper, and Halberstam’s book is worth a look whenever one has the time to give to it.

Deborah Sontag on Cambodia, resources about the country.

Deborah Sontag's 2003 story about a Cambodian genocide survivor makes for gripping reading.

At work today we read most of a 2003 New York Times Magazine story by Deborah Sontag about a young man who fled the killing fields of Cambodia, grew up in a Seattle-area housing project, committed a single crime as a teenager and then, as a consequence of post-September 11 Bush Administration policy, found himself deported to the country he had left nearly 30 years earlier.

It’s a compelling story that packs in telling details and all kind of content areas, with the Cambodian genocide, the experience of genocide survivors in America, the legacy of trauma and Bush’s deportation policy, among others.

Here are some other resources for those wanting to learn more about the country:

When the War Was Over, by Elizabeth Becker. This historical look at Cambodia and the genocide grounds one’s inquiries into the country, its colonial history, and the personal experiences and intellectual forces that shaped Pol Pot.

First They Killed My Father,by Loung Ung.  This harrowing memoir shares the brutality Ung and her family endured during the genocide.

The Flute Player. This Emmy-nominated movie about survivor turned activist turned reviver of ancient Cambodian music Arn Chorn Pond has some unforgettable moments during Pond’s return to Cambodia and is worth watching.  Pond also appears in Academy Award winner Margaret Lazarus’ documentary film, Strong at the Broken Places.

Aidan’s Paper, Dave Cullen’s Columbine

Dave Cullen's Columbine was a major source for Aidan's English term paper.

 

I spent about three hours last night working with Aidan on his English Term Paper. 

His topic is a grim one: the deadliest high school and college shootings in American history. 

Aidan’s learned a lot about the Columbine and Virginia Tech killings, and through that process, has decided that mental illness, rather than bullying, was the primary cause that propelled Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho to kill more than 40 people before turning the guns on themselves. 

His argument is an effective one. 

Aidan draws on articles, the Virginia Tech report, and cartoons to show that bullying, while a pervasive problem in our nation, was less of a motivating force than Klebold’s suicidal depression, Harris’ psychopathy, and Cho’s mental disorders. 

A major source for Aidan was Dave Cullen’s Columbine, most of which he read during our trip last December and this January to Israel. 

I’ve written before about Cullen, a Dart Fellow who spent a decade and went through at least one publisher before completing the work. 

Cullen’s assertion about the killers’ mental states is just one of the many reasons to read this haunting and richly informative book.  He takes on the controversial issue of Cassie Bernall, a young woman who allegedly answered “Yes” when asked by one of the killers if she still believed in her faith shortly before he killed her. 

The book’s panoptic perspective builds a sense of mounting horror as Klebold and Harris accumulate their cache of weapons, publicize their increasingly detailed plot on Harris’ web site. 

Nearly as chilling, if not more so, is Cullen’s description of the system failures in the school’s handling before, and the law enforcement system’s bungling and deception after, the massacre. 

Another point that Cullen makes, and that Aidan brought out in his paper, is that the death toll could have been exponentially higher had the bombs they designed and made actually detonated as the school as planned. 

Of course, the carnage was horrifying, even for a nation accustomed to seeing thousands of violent acts on television on a weekly basis.  While I was hoping to get to Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle last night, I’m grateful to have so much time to spend with Aidan and to have my memory refreshed about the power of Cullen’s work.