Second, “Row row row your boat…merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.”

Third: We musn’t forget that Martin Luther King had “a dream.”

Here’s some lyrics I made up and had my Kindergarteners perform at Afro American Month school assemblies. Unfortunately it got discriminated against and never won a district Oratorical Fest. Want to sing along!?

[Sung to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star]:

“Martin Martin Luther King, Martin Luther had a dream.
When he woke up he said let’s march! March march march march.
Marching here and marching there, marching marching everywhere.
We will come and we will go, we will over come you know.”

Share it with your OPS teacher friends. Sooner or later it’s gonna win big and I’ll be invited to an OUSD board meeting to receive an Oratorical Fest Award and realize the fulfillment of my life’s dream before it gets “rounded by a sleep.”

P.S. Did I ever share that I’m pre-prostate problematic?

I thought I was pretty clear, but I’ll say it again:
A dream can be a motivator to work for something, and at its best it might be a long-term goal. Without motivation, the work won’t get done. Without work, a dream is just synapses firing, a fanatasy. Without the dream, though, where’s the motivation going to come from?

I’m very different from the stereotypical post-adolescent male with coke-bottle-bottom glasses and bad skin, still living in his parents’ basement, eating nothing but potato chips and twinkies, and writing brilliant computer-applications in 36-hour, no-sleep, marathon coding sessions.
(Full disclosure: the bad-skin part used to fit. Now that I’m peri-menopausal, my skin is finally reasonably clear!)

You’ll just have to try to talk to me like a parent, and a unique human being – if you still want to talk to me at all – since I’m an unlikely candidate for any pigeon-holes. I never seem to fit anyone’s categories. And I’m used to being disliked by folks who need their nice neat categories to figure out how to deal with others, because trying to figure out how to deal with someone who can’t be categorized usually causes headaches and stress.

It might help me understand your inability to see in this instance. I may also help me to frame an answer to your question.

I’ve been thinking about the “anti dream novel” you’ve referred to and with a little research I have more material on the subject. However I’m thinking that this is not the thread to continue this line on. If Katy wants to take us further in this direction she knows how to frame a question.

And I’m not looking to pop everybody’s bubble all the time. The photos were of OUSD students happy on graduation day. Good for them. The post that started this branch of discussion included the use of a term which I well know to be a red flag for trouble. I’ll probably return to the issue in time because the issue is married to the greater issue of deadly mis-education of (largely black) urban children.

You think it’s perhaps a cute term, I believe I know better.

Nextset Says:
June 12th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Sue: I think my real problem is that as I mentioned, whenever I hear that word being used this way the speaker (usually black) is in trouble or headed for trouble, or is unrealistic.

So, when Arwa made the comment I quoted, which was the beginning of your whole anti-dream novel, was s/he:
A) in trouble
B) headed for trouble
C) unrealistic
?

I’m afraid I don’t see any of those three options in that one simple sentence, so could you please explain/justify your choice?

What’s the problem with finding inspiration in someone else’s completion of a major milestone in life?

My point was not to JUSTIFY but to UNDERSTAND.

The argument is over the solution.

We actually don’t disagree as much as you might hope — I can see the case for more discipline, less touchy-feeling stuff, magnet schools, increased tracking, non-college track prep, etc., etc. — but your faulty logic, straw-man arguments and righteous posturing drives me nuts.

I probably get on others nerves but when you work in criminal law in California for nearly 30 years you get tired of all the casualties who weren’t trained well at all. And then here comes another generation with even bigger problems… So I fret about education policy. I’m convinced that these kids are being cheated out of the training they need to stay above water in this society – training that others get as a matter of course.

Today I just signed off on a background form as a reference for a new college graduate (social sciences) about to start an entry-level $62,400 civil service job he’ll probably leave in a year to go to grad school. There are jobs out there for people, I see people moving through them. He is a calculating personality who’s had a great life – public high school & Cal State grad. His roommates are a medical resident and a finance grad working in financial industry at high pay.

He and his friends don’t think or speak like this (“dreams”) They say I am going to do this or I want that. Maybe it’s the male vs female thing – but I think it is something much more. You don’t see it. We differ.

A lot of folks are being left behind and the pace is widening.

Cranky: You mentioned, “they are in the here and now of the next few hours”. Well that is the problem. Even men in combat need to have a grasp of the larger battlefield. Present oriented people aren’t going to make it in this society. And I’ve known too many people who grew up poor, in war zones, etc to accept your premise. Joyce Kennard of the State Supreme Court grew up in a Prisoner of War Camp in WWII, she didn’t see a light bulb till she was 14, and lost a leg as a teenager while a prisoner. She emigrated to the states with no family at, maybe 19 years old. The legal profession alone in the Bay Area is full of people from modest beginnings. One of my classmates in law school now practicing drove a tow truck at night after class.

So the stories of how poor/tired/lower class/crime-ridden the kids are doesn’t ever move me. Many people grow up comfortable but so many didn’t who sit beside them in the professions in the Bay Area – poverty doesn’t justify the schools failure to teach and train or the students growing up clueless. It never has, it never will.

I just don’t see the dichotomy your positing between dreams and pragmatism. Sure, sometimes you meet a clueless kid who talks about being a doctor when they can’t even come to class regularly, or think clearly. For the most part, though, most of these struggling kids have neither medium- or long-range goals OR dreams. They are in the hear-and-now of the next two hours: Transport, safety, comfort, food, comaraderie.

In this sense, they are often quite pragmatic: They have learned how to get through the day. Their dream is to not get hassled, beat or killed, and to cop a few laughs here and there. They walk miles to avoid bullies, work for teachers to get money for lunch, beg all day to get change for the bus, navigate the daily minefields of addiction-plagued families, pick fights on campus rather than face a more dangerous engagement in the hood…