Words&Dirt

“Now he realized that in his highest moments of desire he had not known how to stick his head into the crest of the wave and pass through the fabulous crash of his blood.  Loving La Maga had been a sort of rite from which one no longer expected illumination; words and acts had succeeded one another with an inventive monotony, a dance of tarantulas on a moonlit floor, a viscous and prolonged manipulation of echoes.  And all the time he had been waiting for a kind of awakening to come from out of that happy drunkenness, a clearer view of what was around him, whether the colored wallpaper in hotels or the reasons behind any one of his acts, without wanting to understand that by limiting himself to waiting he had abolished all real possibility, as if he had condemned himself in advance to a narrow and trivial present.  He had gone from La Maga to Pola in one fell swoop, without offending La Maga or offending himself, without getting annoyed at caressing Pola’s pink ear with La Maga’s arousing name.  Failure with Pola was the repetition of innumerable failures, a game that ultimately is lost but was beautiful to play, while with La Maga he had begun to come out resentful, with a taste of tartar and a butt that smelled of dawn in the corner of his mouth.  That’s why he took Pola to the same hotel on the Rue Valette, they found the same old woman who greeted them understandingly, what else was there to do in that lousy weather.  It still smelled of toilet soap, of soup, but they had cleaned the blue stain on the rug and there was room for new stains.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 422

“The most lasting Great Society change for the nation’s schools came through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the precursor to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind.  The 1965 law, initially funded at the massive level of $1.2 billion per year, united the left and center around a new role for Washington as a standard setter for state education agencies and local schools.  While the NDEA had targeted funding toward the best and brightest students, ESEA was all about ‘compensatory education’ for the 19 percent of low-income public school students falling behind in poor, largely black and Hispanic schools.  Federal aid would now be offered or withheld depending on whether local policy makers followed national directives, such as supplying low-income schools with up-to-date textbooks, establishing school libraries, and pulling at-risk students out of class for supplemental tutoring.  States that offered their low-income students more state-level funding would be rewarded with more money from the federal government.  Johnson portrayed this expansion of the federal bureaucracy in stirring, soaring rhetoric.  He signed the ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side.  ‘By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,’ he said.  ‘And we rekindle the revolution––the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance.  As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty.  As a former teacher––and, I hope, a future one––I have great expectations of what this law will means for all of our young people.’  Those sky-high expectations placed on educators––as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty––are still with us today.”

––The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, pg. 113-4