Man oh man do I love Matt Damon. Today: defending teachers from spurious attacks from conservative hacks. Tomorrow: exploratory committee for a presidential run. (A girl can hope…)

This is kind of incredible in just how far beyond the pale the authors are willing to venture. Among the list of wrong-doings attributed to the educational muppets are showing Grover “breaking bread with a hippie” (shock! horror! no one should eat with dirty people who make different lifestyle choices than each other!) and having the temerity to depict nontraditional families (like ones who have divorced or live with grandparents) because we all know those families should be ostracized and the kids made to feel like freaks if we want to turn them into productive citizens.

If ideas like finding peaceful solutions to conflicts, being good to the environment, and respecting ways of life different from our own are now the pinko leftist agenda, I guess these commentators are right… but what else would we put on children’s television? And where was the episode in which “Sesame Street taught ethnic minorities about civil disobedience”??? I want to watch that one immediately.

I just finished updating all my February time-sheets, and between my nonprofit and education jobs I managed to work 440 hours in the shortest month of the year.

That’s almost 16 hours a day, every day, and doesn’t include pretty much any time for travel or eating. Ergo, it is mathematically impossible that I got the mandated 8 hours of sleep per night for any significant part of February. Especially because I know I did a few things besides work and sleep… I’ve got a couple friends and hobbies left, right?

This isn’t even a complaint; I like my work and besides things have calmed down a lot already. I’m just sort of marveling at the numbers themselves, and thinking about how this might be one of those cases where numbers tell a more complex and compelling story than my verbal reports. I’m learning that a lot at my job, actually. It’s cool to learn to translate those numbers back into a narrative. Will be cooler when it’s more about demographic analytics and less about my work/life balance. Soon!

Or: our educational paradigm has been skewed toward a certain type of learner for 2,000 years, when will Project Zero and Howard Gardner’s research on Multiple Intelligences become required reading for… well, for everyone? I still like this passage though, retrieved from the musky catacombs of the little I remember from an 8th grade Rabbinics class:

There are four types among those who study with the sages: the Sponge, the Funnel, the Strainer, and the Sifter.

• The sponge: absorbs everything.
• The funnel: in one end and out the other.
• The strainer: passes the wine, retains the dregs.
• The sifter: removes the chaff, retains the groats.

Pirke Avot 5:17

So the rebbes liked traditional, Analytic learners too, shock of all shocks. Interesting to think about how a kid who is, say, a kinesthetic or interpersonal/emotional learner could become a sifter… everyone can, I think, once we put in the time to figure out how to teach to them.

Well this story isn’t making me feel any better about my first venture into for-profit employment.

Granted, I’ve made the choice to tutor K-8 students, which is just about the farthest department from Kaplan’s profit-seeking colleges which sit at the heart of the controversy. But I harbor no delusions about the model on which the well-known tutoring and test-prep arm of the company functions: families with money buy their children better educations, either through increased SAT scores or the invaluable hours of academic attention from a tutor. These Kaplan programs bolster the status quo, keeping “middle class plus” families in good schools and careers, and passively leaving students without means to fend for themselves. And then the new for-profit colleges take an actively predatory role when these low-income students don’t perform well enough to move on to traditional colleges. They’ve tacitly set the whole thing up.

Frankly it seems like a conflict of interests to have a news agency and an educational institution under the same corporate banner in the first place. But WaPo lobbying for Kaplan does feel like an extra step over the line. And I’m not sure what to do except bite the bullet and concentrate on helping the kids in front of me, politics be damned.

See, as far as I can tell, this is a good bill. Increased subsidies for much-needed free lunch and dinner programs, an actual instance of the word “bipartisan” having real meaning, and a stated focus on getting kids balanced, nutritious meals. Great.

I just want to know why the framing in every single news outlet has to be “WAR ON OBESITY FAT FAT FATTY CRISIS” or something about banning brownies. Are concepts like “health” and “nutrition” just not sexy enough? Why does an article about the cause have to focus on a single symptom, and the one that comes with a heaping helping of shame to boot?

I guess at this point we’re supposed to be thankful that we didn’t lose to the conservative detractors who floated the argument that children who take advantage of meal programs by definition have criminally negligent parents and should be removed from their care. Poverty being an express crime now, during the recession, instead of an implicit one as it’s been for the past fifty years (or maybe since the beginning of time, choose your frame of reference as you will).