Emily Iles [a blog]

I thought a lot about the 8-day Chiacgo Teachers’ Strike as it was going on. I never wrote anything about it, because I have many friends who are teachers, and my immediate reaction was that the strike was selfish and a near-perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with public education, where employment is of more concern than making sure children are well-educated.

Last week, Bill Maher had John Legend as a guest on Real Time, and John Legend made the point that if we can’t expect any particular performance from teachers, if we’re not going to hold them accountable for using the 6 or 7 hours they have with students to move the needle on that child’s development, we might as well just staff classrooms with babysitters. If you have a chance to go back and watch it (September 14), it’s a terrific couple of minutes.

And that brings me to new rules.

Rule #1: If teachers are so important (and I think they are), it shouldn’t be too hard to prove that with evaluations.

Rule #2: Poverty does not make a child incapable of learning.

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My constant thought throughout the teacher’s strike was that the teachers I know (the teachers I was concerned about offending), would most certainly benefit from evaluation alone, and they’d benefit more so from merit pay - because they’re incredible teachers. 

Not only are they incredible teachers, but they are incredible teachers who have been held back because of tenure restrictions - both at the beginning, middle, and end of their careers.

My art teacher in elementary school is a close friend of our family. She’s retiring this year - and she’s been thinking of retirement for a while, even though she doesn’t want to give up teaching, because each year she stays on after some magical point, she loses more money from her pension. She has so much more to offer kids, but she’s reached some arbitrary expiration date.

Another friend is just beginning as a teacher, and in order to get her foot in the door at schools, she was up early in the morning trying to grab substitute teaching spots, she taught at a school as a substitute while one teacher was on maternity leave, and the teachers and administrators loved her - but when a position opened up, they had to hire someone with tenure, though they wanted and tried to hire my friend.

In high school, I had a terrific English teacher. She took us from the Fountainhead, to Kate Chopin’s Awakening; she introduced me to one of my favorite poets, Richard Brautigan; she was a firebrand. I also took a creative writing class with one of the most dumpy, listless teachers I’ve ever had. She rarely came to class, and when she did her direction was uninspiring, to say the least. We let our English teacher know how bad it was, and said she should teach the class. She told she had tried to get the class, but the woman who taught it had seniority, and she was just going to have to wait until she retired to have a shot at teaching creative writing.

So I see tenure, LIFO, Seniority, and all of these other non-merit-based ways of evaluating teachers not just as shelter for truly terrible teaching. I also see them as holding back and diminishing the power of great teachers - and we know that the power of great teaching can be transformative for children. 

It strikes me that doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily feel good. That may seem like a simple thought, but I think sometimes I expect “doing the right thing” to be accompanied by sweeping inspirational orchestras and montages of people smiling at me - when it’s really more likely that, when “doing the right thing” is murky and complicated, I’m more likely to feel worried, confront disappointment, experience strained or broken relationships.

It’s tempting to think of the cost of doing the right thing as token: in the movies, the cost is taking oneself less seriously, or leaving a terrible job to go on an awesome adventure, or fighting in an army - but alongside dozens, no hundreds! of true and loyal friends. But at times, the cost can be other good things, like relationships, stability, even self-esteem.

It’s vague, I know, and the generalizations are sweeping, but I felt compelled to write down that feeling where the weight of an action causes fissures to open up, and the hatches to be unbattened.

Suddenly, I’ve been plunged into art criticism. I’ve been reading Thomas Hart Benton: A Life by Justin Wolff in preparation for a project. It’s terrifically compelling: Thomas Hart Benton, native son of Missouri and author of the mural A Social History of Missouri at the Capitol in Jeff City, was a political lightening rod and a major player in America’s art history. The biography is a pretty brutal romp through Benton’s life, and it’s a really unusual lense through which to look at the history of Missouri, and the history of art in the U.S. - ack, there is so much I’d like to say about Benton’s life, but I will hold off until I finish the thing.

I also recently read a NY Times article, I was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf. It’s the minor tragedy of an aspiring artist, John Powers, who found himself churning out, factory-style, the epic visions of Jeff Koons and eventually breaking down and leaving art altogether.

Big Think wonders,

If Jeff Koons is the paradigm for today’s major artist and this is roughly the experience young artists working under him garner, then what does that mean for the long-hallowed tradition of the atelier, where artists teach others artists the trade? If a young artist can crack under these modern conditions, is the tradition of the artist-teacher broken?

Since I was in the midst of reading about Benton’s most famous protege, Jackson Pollock, “destroy dozens of his own paintings, slashing them repeatedly with a kitchen knife and throwing the shreds out the window,” and that he “reserved a special hostility for his Bentonesque paintings,” I had to chuckle a little. Seems that for quite a while, apprenticeships have been contentious, more than a little Freudian, and that new art movements have been birthed from violent reactions to mentors. I mean, you probably can’t find two more dissimilar American painters than Pollock and Benton (at least in style).

The relationship between Benton and Pollock is wild and sweet, and Benton’s uncanny ability to step in political… dogpiles, let’s say… is a really good read. The ways that the aesthetic values of modernist artists and regionalist artists were inseparable from their political and ethical values was interesting to me as a lover of art - but if you’re from Missouri I think you’ll find something particularly meaty and poignant in Wolff’s biography.

Last week my parents came to visit, and brought along with what they estimated to be the most interesting chunk of their record collection. It included some records I remember listening to when I was really young, like Danny Kaye’s children’s albums; some albums I swear I discovered all by myself as a teenager, like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; and some albums that are definitely from my mom, like Linda Ronstadt.

Of course, it must have been a little funny to my dad when I started playing Miles Davis and Van Morrison on my CD player, with all of the same records sitting in a closet. 

Marketwatch over at the Wall Street Journal has an apropos article about bequeathing your itunes library. Short article shorter, you can’t - in the most legal sense. For anyone who bought music off of itunes or Amazon.com, you bought a license that’s not transferrable - but there’s also the miasma of digital music ripped from CDs or downloaded under dubious circumstances, or given freely by musicians [shameless plug of my friend Ryan] that isn’t under that kind of restriction. How do you make sure you can give that away when you’re gone? Do you just list your passwords in your will (…to my son Roger I give my Kindle login…)?

Some lawyers are on the case. And maybe dodging digital copyright protections will be the new mixtape.

I think, though, that music ownership has had its heyday, and models like Rhapsody or Spotify, where you don’t “possess” a file, or a record or tape or CD, but simply pay a subscription to stream whatever you want to hear at the moment, will prevail. 

Recently, an NPR intern drew a target on her back when she wrote a blog about having a massive music collection she never paid for. She got a lot of flak for an attitude that she was entitled to music, and that if it wasn’t “easy” to acquire, it was therefore okay to steal.

From live orchestras to Victrolas to radios to records, cassettes, CDs, mp3, it seems like we’re always finding new ways to get music to more people. It’s possible that in our family we’ll have bought a record, a cassette, a CD and a digital copy of Kind of Blue. I pretty much think it’s worth it.

What a beautiful app. Read about it at Fast Co., then find your hood and make it art! 

I am no culinary genius, so if you see me posting recipes, Rejoice! because they are probably really easy to make. My post-baby-having diet is kind of on the paleo side of things: very low carb, heavy on the meat, veggies (few potatoes or other starchy veggies), and fruit and nuts. I’m enjoying it; I think it’s easy to stick to, get enough calories and make some stuff that tastes pretty good.

Yesterday, we had some roasted chicken breast from the previous evening, and thought a curry chicken salad would be nice for the summer. We threw in: granny smith apples, golden raisins, pecans, fat-free mayo, curry powder and a little garam masala.

I believe the quality of the meat you eat is really important to overall health and wellness. To me, it’s worth spending more on my food.

Next time, I’d like to try avocado instead of mayo, then it would be very paleo. 

All together now. It was super yummy, really easy and perfect for summer. You don’t really need bread, either. Plus, I got to use my handsome new cutting board.

1. Tune-Yards  |  Gangsta

2. James Blake + Bon Iver  |  Falls Creek Boys Choir

3. Fleet Foxes  |  Battery Kinzie

4. Beirut  |  Santa Fe

5. Bon Iver  |  Calgary

6. St. Vincent  |  Year of the Tiger

7. Laura Marling  |  Salinas

8. Radiohead  |  King of Limbs

9. Lykke Li  |  Get Some

10. Tori Amos  |  Shattering Sea

11. Dirty Projectors + Bjork  |  On and Ever Onward

12. James Blake  |  Limit to your Love