Sunday, August 16, 2009
a serious waste
Every year, the big districts in this area gather all of its employees in a gym at one of the high schools. The purpose of this gathering is, purportedly, to get everyone jazzed up about the school year.This is not what happens.What happens is that the thousands of teachers, administrators and assistants, who have spent the last few days frenetically preparing their classroom/leson plans/minds for the little angels they will attempt to beguile into learning, and who still have an unmanageable amount left to accomplish before the first bell rings, sit, for an hour and half, while the school superintendent bloviates.And if you think city councilment/countycomissioners/senators know how to do this, I have news for you. Every school superintendent I have ever listened to at these meetings has forgottem more about putting on a long, desperately meaningless mess of jargon and line graphs than any glorified city or county aparatchik has ever learned.What is more, they are able to present this stunningly dead series of slides accompanied by commentary combining the most obvious statements (we want all our students to graduate!) with the most fantastic claims (by 2014, all our students will be proficient or advanced [really? the little 6th grade girl I met earlier today, who does not speak understandably, and who needs her mother to literally hold her by the hand and lift her into seats, will be proficient or advanced in high school? Praise Jesus!!]), all delivered in a monotone worthy of, well, Ben Stein if Ben Stein wasn't funny, to thousands of caffeine-deprived people sitting in bleachers. Have you ever sat in overcrowded high school bleachers while listening to an hour and half long speech? It's pretty much pure hell. But we are the ultimate captive audience, aren't we? We have to be there; we're happy to be employed (like Dylan once sang); and about the only recourse available to us is to refuse to applaud. Which I pretty much did.And oh, yes, there is usually a cute little joke, or, in this afternoon's case, a mime of a children's book enacted by the school district big shots, that is supposed to make you leave laughing and feeling better about the whole dreadful affair.It didn't work.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Interns
Interns
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.
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