Why I'm Voting for Obama

I am voting for a president that understands education reform is the key to moving this country forward and not letting us fall even further behind.

I am voting for a president who recognizes global warming is not a hoax and wants to protect the environment, investing in the clean energy we will depend on in the future.

I am voting for a president the rest of the world respects.

I am voting for a president who sides with the majority of Americans instead of corporate interests and big oil.

I am voting for a president who plans to uphold Roe v. Wade and believes religion has no place influencing policy decisions because women legally deserve the right to choose what to do with their bodies.

I am voting for a president who truly believes in equality and wants to legalize gay marriage so all people can make the same commitment to the people they love.


I just hope I wake up on Wednesday morning still believing in what this country could be with the right leadership.  This election matters--VOTE! 

change starts at home

Last week, I had dinner with some family friends at my parents' house.  One of these friends is an eighth grade math teacher.  We were discussing the differences between teaching ten years ago and teaching now, and I was appalled at some of the things she mentioned.

We talked about how a generation ago, if a kid came home with a bad report card his or her parents wanted to know what happened.  Why was their kid doing poorly in school?  Clearly they needed to work harder or maybe even get some tutoring.  Nowadays, parents see a bad report card and they want to know what their child's teacher did wrong.  No one can argue with the fact that teachers have very much to do with their students' success and good teaching goes a long way, but since when do kids not have any responsibility in earning good grades?  In this current generation of school aged children, we are obsessed with making sure they know how fabulous they are.  Any effort is good enough.  Whatever they do they are all winners.  Encouraging a child to try his or her best is a good thing, but in life there are in fact winners and losers.  Not everyone is good at everything.  There is something to be said for teaching a child to put in an honest effort in everything they try and that hard work pays off.  Children give up too easily now.  If something is the least bit difficult they move on to the next hobby or task.  And not only are parents allowing this to happen, but they're encouraging it in some cases.  

Our family's teacher friend shared that she often gets requests from parents to not give their children homework.  In fact, multiple parents sign off on homework by initialing it after twenty minutes, because according to them their children shouldn't be spending more than that on homework per subject.  No more than twenty minutes?

This particular teacher says to do her homework thoroughly it usually takes an hour.  So these students who are only allowed to do twenty minutes per subject are actually losing out because they will be less prepared than their classmates who spend an hour a night on their homework.  These parents are doing their children a disservice.  Not only are they ensuring their children are underprepared for their exams and will most likely get lower grades, but they're also teaching them it's okay not to put in your best effort.  Eighth grade teachers are in charge of preparing their students for high school.  This often means giving them more homework than they did in seventh grade to prepare them for the workload that high school requires.  Speaking from personal experience, I had about three-four hours of homework a night in high school, and there's no way that an hour a night for all my subjects in eighth grade would have prepared me for that.

What I found very interesting about all of this was our friend said the parents who never complained their children were getting too much homework tended to be highly educated themselves and very successful.  The parents who signed off after twenty minutes on the other hand were often people who didn't do very well in school themselves and had received less higher education.  This is similar to what I experienced in New Orleans.  Parents who never made it very far in school didn't value their children's educations as uber important.  Their are many layers to solving the education crisis in this country.  And one of these layers starts at home---parents need to stand behind their children and defend their right to a quality education.  They also need to believe that education is important and a path to success for their children.

In my last entry I was writing about how the education system in this country needs to change.  Well, today I would argue that we need to change too.  We need to require more of our children.  We need to fight for their future while still teaching them that they have to work hard and take responsibility for their actions.  If we don't do these things, the problems in our education system are going to get much worse before they get better.  

the problem with our generation

I have been meaning to write something similar to this for a few years now.  I envision it being the introduction to a book I one day hope to write.  I hope it strikes a chord!

            I was raised to be a productive, successful citizen of the world.  My parents invested in my education early on and I was always involved in extracurricular activities like sports, art and music.  My future was never in question.  I went to an expensive boarding school for high school and then on to a reputable, private university.  I never questioned the "reach for the stars", "the sky's the limit", "you can be whatever you want to be" mantras I was fed growing up until I graduated from college and was dumped in the real world.  No one out there was invested in my success; it was all up to me and for the first time I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

           My generation is the generation of the internet.  We were the first kids to grow up with computers in our homes and a wealth of information at our fingertips.  Instant gratification was the name of the game.  It made it easier to keep in touch with loved ones, school projects got better, and boredom was harder to come by.  But this great technological advance also made us lazier and more impatient.  We came to expect that everything was as easy and quick as googling it.  So, when our parents promised us the world we didn't doubt it because everything else had come relatively easily to us already.  But in all this preparation, our generation missed the memo on the value of hard work.  Everything had been handed to us so far.  We expected the same to happen with money, our dream jobs, and a happily ever after.  Well, the joke's on us because life had other plans.

            I graduated from college in 2009, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.  Jobs were scarce and for the first time the future seemed uncertain for kids like me.  But I'm a white girl from the upper-middle class.  What did the economic crisis mean for kids who grew up in poverty and weren't made the same promises I was growing up?

           My first encounter with real poverty occurred in the spring of 2007 when I traveled to New Orleans to assist with post-Katrina rebuilding efforts on an Alternative Spring Break.  Even then, what I saw only scratched the surface of what was really going on down there though.  I fell in love with the city and its people, and went back on another Alternative Spring Break trip during my college years.  By the time my senior year rolled around I had decided to apply to Teach for America and put New Orleans at the top of my list for cities I'd like to be sent to.  New Orleans was considered a high need area for teachers, so when I was accepted that is where I was placed.  I arrived in June of 2009 to be met with oppressive heat and a cockroach outside my dorm room at Tulane.  I was completely unprepared for what awaited me.  Idealism, a desire to reform the failing New Orleans education system, and my Northern naivety had gotten me there, but they weren't going to help me much anymore.

           One of our first days of orientation, my fellow TFAers and I were introduced to some harrowing statistics:

• Every year close to 12 million students reach their senior year in high school not knowing how to read.
• About 44 million adults in the United States cannot read.
• The United States Justice Department uses the results of third grade reading diagnostics to determine how many beds we will need in prisons in the next ten years.
• The state of Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of the industrialized world.

Hearing these disturbing facts just motivated me even more to make a difference at the time, and that was the intention.  But once I was actually in a classroom responsible for the education of young minds it was a completely different story.  In my first week, I saw a second grader get beaten with a yard stick for not listening.  An eighth grader called me a bitch and told me to go fuck myself when I asked him why he wasn't in class. A seventh grade boy was dealing drugs because he figured it would get him farther than school since he was already fifteen and couldn't read. And my paraprofessional told me to just hit him back when one of my violent students continually punched me.  I was lead teacher in a severe-profound classroom, a position I really had no business having, but it shows the desperation of the New Orleans school system at the time.  All my students had severe disabilities--- autism, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation.  The irony is that if they had been born into wealthier families like mine they would have received more early intervention & care and have been much higher functioning.  But what I quickly learned was that poor African American children are taught life will fail you.  There were no "reach for the stars" speeches in my students' homes.  Education wasn't an avenue to success for them, it was a failed venture.  Their parents didn't see the value in education because the system had failed them too, so the importance of doing well in school wasn't instilled in them like it was in me.

              It was really easy for me to get angry about the discrepancy between my childhood and my students--- the achievement gap it's called.  It is a term most of us are probably familiar with at this point.  When a rich kid and a poor kid both start kindergarten they are most likely around the same level, but for each year that passes they will grow farther and farther apart.  In a just world, every child would receive the same quality education regardless of race, class or geography.  In fact, it seems like it would be in our economy's best interest to have a better educated workforce.  Wouldn't we be competing better in a global economy?  Wouldn't we all be better off financially if there were a more level playing field?  This is all rhetoric we've been hearing a lot lately, especially with the upcoming election.  But I would like to take the argument one step further and propose that the way I grew up isn't right either.

            Don't get me wrong, I am grateful my parents made my education a priority, but I'm mad as hell that not all parents in this country are able to do the same.  You should be too!  I don't want to live in a world where the realities in which I grew up and the ones in which my students were raised both exist.  And kids like me shouldn't grow up ignorant to the fact that not everyone is as lucky as them. Call me naive, call me idealistic, but in my mind there is no social or economic justification for it.  And after witnessing what I did in New Orleans, I'm happy to still be idealistic.

         I lasted seven months in my Teach for America placement.  Since the required commitment to the program is two years I'm not proud I quit.  I take full responsibility for my actions, but the truth is that I got overwhelmed in a position TFA never should have put me in and I burned out too quickly.  I didn't make the impact I envisioned when I applied, all wide-eyed and eager to make a difference, but I'm done with the guilt that has been plaguing me for the past two and a half years.  What hasn't wavered is my desire to change things, and nothing changes until we demand that it does.

          So, this is my call to action.  We all need to educate ourselves on the inequalities and injustices that exist right under our noses.  We need to demand that our government and our country do better.  And we all need to be the changes we wish to see because things are bound to get a whole lot worse before they get any better.  It's true that ignorance is bliss, so let's stop being ignorant, recognize the system needs to change, and together we can figure out what to do about it.  I can't turn back knowing what I know and now you know it too...

happy endings

My sister Emily (in the green) and me with some happy newlyweds. Zaragoza, Spain.  August, 2012.

            As my 26th birthday approaches everyone around me seems to be getting engaged or married. I thought I had more time before the wedding march began and it's hard not to feel a pang of jealousy as all my friends find their happy endings when mine is nowhere in sight.  I often find myself wondering if marriage is even something I want--isn't it just an outdated institution with unrealistic expectations?  Do I really know that many married couples who are still happy after years of marriage?  But it's still hard not to feel the societal pull to tie the knot and succumb to the notion of happily ever afters...

            This summer, I was lucky enough to travel to Spain for one of my oldest friend's weddings.  Raquel and I have known each other since we were sixteen when we met during my junior year of high school abroad in Zaragoza.  Raquel's family adopted me and welcomed me into their home in one of the hardest and best years of my life.  Theirs was a family I chose to be a part of, one that accepted and loved me when I needed family the most.  To see someone so dear to me who I have watched turn into the incredible woman she is today start the next chapter of her life with her husband was unbelievably emotional for me. As I watched Raquel and Oscar come out of the church as husband and wife for the first time, there was no room for jealousy.  All I could feel for Raquel was immense happiness.

              I'm the first to recognize that jealousy is never a productive emotion.  So for now, as I watch the people I love walk down the aisle I will share in their happiness and hope that the beginning of their happy endings means mine is out there waiting for me too.

Raquel y Oscar, August 4, 2012