A few articles
Feb. 25th, 2010 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on OT for handwriting
Watch How You Hold That Crayon
By PEG TYRE
NOAH LASCANO, 8, had a problem: His teachers couldn’t read his handwriting. His homework became a frustrating exercise in writing once, and then, at the teacher’s request, writing again, just for legibility.
His brother, James, 5, was struggling in kindergarten — even drawing stick figures was a task. When his mother, Paula Lascano, tried to cajole him into completing a few workbook assignments, he reported that “his hand got too tired.”
Like many parents, Ms. Lascano decided it was time for help, so 10 months ago she hired Casey Halper, a pediatric occupational therapist, to work first with James, and then with Noah, once a week. The boys manipulated stiff green putty, put pegs into boards, created chains of pennies and plastic connectors and wrote the alphabet — again and again.
These days, many little fingers are being drilled. Twenty-five years ago, pediatric occupational therapists primarily served children with severe disabilities like spina bifida, autism or cerebral palsy. Nowadays, these therapists are just as focused on helping children without obvious disabilities to hold a pencil.
In affluent neighborhoods in and around New York, occupational therapists have taken their place next to academic tutors, psychologists, private coaches and personal trainers — the army that often stands behind academically successful students.
Tim Nanof, legislative manager for the American Occupational Therapy Association, which has 38,000 members, said it’s hard to know exactly how many children are receiving these services. But parents, pediatricians, educators and early childhood experts agree that plenty of able-bodied children are receiving occupational therapy.
“Twenty years ago, you could find O.T.’s working with children at hospitals or schools for the blind or the deaf,” said Christine Berg, who oversees the curriculum for the Program in Occupational Therapy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Now, many pediatric O.T.’s see their role as promoting fitness and enhancing kids’ performance in school.”
Pediatric occupational therapy may be something like Pilates for the pint-size set — a regime of techniques that promise to bestow unique benefits on the practitioner. Or, like the increase in neuropsychological testing and in the use of drugs to enhance a child’s attention, the increase in therapy could suggest something may have gone awry in schools, in our level of academic expectations or perhaps in childhood itself.
“On one hand, I think it’s perfectly in line with the contemporary trend for parents and educators to seek high-priced specialists to treat the routine problems of childhood,” said Dr. Philippa Gordon, a popular pediatrician in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who is a medical adviser to the highly opinionated Park Slope Parents Web site. “On the other hand, I see that early intervention can keep little problems from becoming big ones.”
Linda Florin, who runs a private concierge service in Manhattan, paid a therapist $125 a week for nearly three years to help her son, Wyatt, now a first grader at Columbia Prep, improve his hand strength and control a pencil. She says it was money well spent. “School isn’t easy and it gets harder as they get older,” Ms. Florin said. “I wanted him to be able to keep up with everyone else.”
She also said the stigma is gone: “Back when I was a child, seeing an O.T.? Forget it. That was for kids who had spinal cord injuries.” Last year, she said, so many friends from her social circle were taking their children to occupational therapists that it seemed like a part of normal childhood.
“Seeing an O.T. was once an admission that something was seriously wrong with your child,” said Paula McCreedy, who, with her partner, Prudence Heisler, opened a branch of their busy Greenwich Village practice in Brooklyn Heights in part to meet the growing demand of private paying families seeking therapy. These days, she said, “many parents are finding that pediatric occupational therapists can help their children to be the best that they can be.”
In Manhattan, the brutally competitive nursery and kindergarten admissions process is leading many parents to sign up their toddlers for therapy. “Preschool admissions tests loom large,” said Margie Becker-Lewin, an occupational therapist on the Upper West Side. “In many cases, parents know there is nothing wrong with their child, but they feel caught in the middle.”
Their child might be exhibiting a minor fine-motor delay at a play group, she added, “and the parents understand that as the children get involved in the admissions process that there is not as much tolerance for a range of abilities as there once was.”
One father on the Upper East Side said anxiety about his son’s grip — his 3-year-old holds crayons in his fist — propelled him to seek therapy.
“The nursery admission people tell you they want your child to be ready to learn how to write,” said the father, who spoke anonymously so his son wouldn’t run afoul of nursery school administrators. “And I knew they would take one look at the way my son held a crayon and he’d be out of the running.”
The father pointed out that many families use occupational therapists to help their children gain admission to elite schools. “Even with the economy like it is, the hottest question when we socialized at our country house this summer was not what country club do you belong to, but who is your child’s O.T. back in the city. And how can I get an appointment?”
For some grade-school children, occupational therapists are also filling the void left by schools, many of which no longer provide instruction on the mechanics of handwriting. According to a survey conducted by the American Occupational Therapy Association, about 30 percent of their members now work in schools, up from 18.6 percent in 1999. Those therapists, said Ms. Berg of Washington University, tend to spend the bulk of their time helping children write legibly.
“Many teachers don’t know how to do it,” Ms. Berg said. “O.T.’s can help.”
Linda Tulloch waited in vain for teachers at the North Street School, a public elementary school in Greenwich, Conn., to provide her son, Jack, now a fifth grader, with handwriting instruction. “As early as second grade I could see he needed help shaping his letters and numbers,” she said.
But Jack’s teachers told her that handwriting was old school and that students would wield a keyboard, not a pencil. “That didn’t sit well with me,” Ms. Tulloch said. “Kids can’t use a keyboard to take a test or do math.” Ultimately, Ms. Tulloch hired a tutor, who uses a handwriting program, Handwriting Without Tears, designed by an occupational therapist.
Steve Sanders, director of the University of South Florida School of Physical Education and Exercise Science, also points to ramped-up expectations. “I’d say schools that push serious academics into kindergarten and pre-school — and emphasize sitting at desks and learning — are creating some of this problem,” he said.
But Anthony DiCarlo, the longtime principal of the William E. Cottle Elementary School in Tuckahoe, N.Y., a suburb north of Manhattan, said that many children are experiencing delays in their fine and gross motor skills.
“Almost all our kids come into kindergarten able to recite their letters and their numbers,” Mr. DiCarlo said. “Some can even read. But in the last five years, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of kids who don’t have the strength in their hands to wield a scissors or do arts and crafts projects, which in turn prepares them for writing.”
Many kindergartners in his community, he said, have taken music appreciation classes or participated in adult-led sports teams or yoga. And most have also logged serious time in front of a television or a computer screen. But very few have had unlimited opportunities to run, jump and skip, or make mud pies and break twigs. “I’m all for academic rigor,” he said, “but these days I tell parents that letting their child mold clay, play in the sand or build with Play-Doh builds important school-readiness skills, too.”
The problem has become so acute that two years ago, Mr. DiCarlo hired a full-time occupational therapist to work with the 500 students in his elementary school. The therapist, Deirdre Madden, spends 40 percent of her day with children who have diagnosed disabilities, and the rest of her time improving the fine motor skills and muscle control of the rest of the students.
“In my previous job I was working with children who had much more severe disabilities, and I couldn’t really see what role I’d have in a regular school,” Ms. Madden said. “But it turns out that many of the children here needed more support. And I’m only too happy to help.”
One about the troubles of taking the census in NYC
New York’s Nooks Are a Challenge to Census Takers
By SAM ROBERTS
One River Place blends easily into the dense forest of Manhattan skyscrapers, its vanity address camouflaging its precise location. Still, even in New York City, a 40-story tower containing 900 apartments should be difficult to miss.
But the Census Bureau did.
The apartment building at 500 12th Avenue, between 41st and 42nd Streets, was one of the first residential developments on the western fringes of Hell’s Kitchen when it opened in 2000. It was so far west, in fact, that it never showed up on the residential property map the bureau prepared for the 2010 census.
New York City planners discovered the oversight and alerted the bureau. Likewise, the city told the bureau about two nearby 60-story buildings with a total of 1,400 apartments that opened last spring after the bureau had finished compiling addresses for this census.
As the federal Census Bureau starts its most ambitious effort ever to count the country, no other city presents a bigger challenge than New York, with its huge immigrant population crammed into easily missed and often illegal nooks and crannies.
In all, the city has provided Census officials the addresses of at least 127,000 apartments or homes — nearly 4 percent of all the housing in the city — that the bureau did not have. Most of the addresses are in one-, two- and three-family homes that had been subdivided, legally and illegally.
A decade ago, 55 percent of the census forms in New York were sent back, compared with the national rate of 67 percent. In some city neighborhoods, the response rate was less than 40 percent.
“As a place of unparalleled population diversity and an eclectic mix of housing types, New York City has always been hard to count,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of New York’s Department of City Planning. “This is especially true in the last decade, when the city experienced voluminous housing growth.”
The 2010 count of New York has not officially begun, but city demographers have already discovered about 300,000 people, including the tenants of those three Manhattan buildings, whom the bureau might have missed because it did not have their addresses.
They have also highlighted neighborhoods — including Washington Heights in Manhattan, Astoria in Queens and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn — where roughly 600,000 immigrants who arrived over the last decade have settled and how to find them.
Dozens of city workers have fanned out across the city, tallying mailboxes and doorbells on hundreds of homes where multiple families might be living or where tenants might be squirreled away in illegally converted attics and basements. The Census Bureau needs to “see behind the door,” Dr. Salvo said.
The decennial census is about a lot more than counting heads. The count is vital in reapportioning Congressional and state legislative districts, and in the distribution of billions of dollars in federal aid. This year, everyone will get the same form with just 10 questions, including the names and the number of household residents, their age, sex and race and if they are of Hispanic origin.
The questionnaires will be mailed to more than three million New York households in about two weeks and are due back by April 1. Filling out such a short form and returning it in a prepaid envelope might seem simple enough (and takes less time, the bureau says, than hard-boiling an egg).
But mindful of the obstacles, the Census Bureau and New York City officials have embarked on an unprecedented cooperative campaign to increase compliance.
The bureau’s New York regional office has hired 70 workers to reach out to ethnic groups, clergy members and civic groups to help promote the count. It has rolled out a media blitz that includes billboards and vans that have traveled throughout the city. And the bureau is coordinating closely with Dr. Salvo and Stacey Cumberbatch, who is the city’s full-time census coordinator.
Her office has reached out to groups like the United African Congress and the Y.M.C.A.’s New Americans Initiative to brief recent immigrants about the importance of the census.
Beginning in late March, the Census Bureau will provide Ms. Cumberbatch with real-time questionnaire return rates by neighborhood so she can dispatch follow-up teams.
“It is essential that New York City receive an accurate census count, because the census is statistical reality — a reality that will define us for the next 10 years,” Dr. Salvo said. “If you’re missed in the census enumeration, it’s like you don’t exist.”
The city and the Census Bureau hope to avoid a repeat of the 1990 census, when the city challenged the count and the bureau acknowledged that it had missed more than 240,000 New Yorkers.
Because the bureau relies, in part, on the previous census in compiling its list of residential addresses, its records are often outdated. In some cases, people are living at street addresses, like Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan over former railyards in the West 60s and 70s, that did not even exist in 2000.
This time the bureau is aiming for a questionnaire return rate in New York of 70 percent.
“There are some census tracts that could easily meet that, like the Upper East Side, where there are homeowners, English speakers,” said Lester A. Farthing, the bureau’s New York regional director. “Our biggest challenge is working on tracts where the mail response was low. You need to saturate New York to get the word out.”
The bureau will open sites throughout the city to help people fill out the questionnaires and to provide forms in various languages — the mailed forms are in English or, in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, in English and Spanish. One key message: None of the information is shared with any other government agencies.
“Our greatest challenge is trying to convince the majority of the foreign-born population that the census is safe, that you’re not going to be hurt or harmed,” Mr. Farthing said.
The bureau is concentrating on neighborhoods that are considered hard to count because residents are disproportionately poor, unemployed, live in apartment buildings, have no telephones, have moved there recently or are single parents.
People who do not respond to the survey will get a follow-up form, and if they ignore that, they will get a visit from an enumerator or census taker; 40,000 were hired in New York in 2000.
“If you’re worried about someone coming to your door,” Mr. Farthing said, “the answer is, mail it back.”
The City Planning Department has been so aggressive in pursuing people the census might miss that demographers have dubbed it “the Salvo effect.” Acting as human bloodhounds, 60 agency workers have spent part of the past three years combing through records and conducting on-site inspections.
“It’s amazing how many cable TV lines go into a house where one family supposedly lives,” Dr. Salvo said.
In 2000, the city’s population officially topped eight million for the first time, thanks largely to the Salvo effect. In 2008, the population stood at 8,363,710, according to the bureau’s annual American Community Survey. Dr. Salvo expects the 2010 census to record 8.4 million residents.
To find overlooked New Yorkers, researchers even considered using water bills to estimate how many times toilets were flushed and gauge population based on average human needs. But, Dr. Salvo said, “That is too unreliable, from an empirical standpoint.”
And this one: China’s Han Flock to Theme Parks Featuring Minorities
It has pictures
China’s Han Flock to Theme Parks Featuring Minorities
By EDWARD WONG
MANZHA, China — Tucked away in China’s steamy tropical southwest are the villages of the Dai people, famous throughout the country for a raucous annual tradition: a water-splashing festival where the Dai douse one another for three days in the streets using any container they can get their hands on — buckets, wash basins, teacups, balloons, water guns.
But in Manzha and four surrounding villages, the springtime festival has taken on added significance — or insignificance, depending on how you look at it. Imagine a nonstop Mardi Gras with fire hoses: at a site called the Dai Minority Park, water-splashing extravaganzas take place every day.
Yuppies from China’s boom cities arrive by the busload to take part in a wild frenzy of dousing and dunking and drenching with 100 Dai women dressed in bright pink, yellow and blue traditional dresses — “our warmest and sweetest Dai princesses,” as an announcer calls them.
“A lot of tourists want to come see this, but it’s only a few days a year,” said Zhao Li, one of the management office employees, who are virtually all Han, the dominant ethnic group in China. “So we decided to make it every day, so everyone can experience water splashing.”
The Dai park, with its wooden stilt homes, groomed palm trees and elephant statues, is part of an increasingly popular form of entertainment in China — the ethnic theme playground, where middle-class Han come to experience what they consider the most exotic elements of their vast nation. There is no comprehensive count of these Disneyland-like parks, but people in the industry say the number is growing, as are visitors. The Dai park, whose grounds encompass 333 actual Dai households, attracts a half-million tourists a year paying $15 each.
The parks are money-making ventures. But scholars say they also serve a political purpose — to reinforce the idea that the Chinese nation encompasses 55 fixed ethnic minorities and their territories, all ruled by the Han.
“They’re one piece in the puzzle of the larger project of how China wants to represent itself as a multiethnic state,” said Thomas S. Mullaney, a historian at Stanford University who studies China’s ethnic taxonomy. “The end goal is political, which is territorial unity. Parks like that, even if they’re kitschy, kind of like Legoland, they still play and occupy a political position.”
China’s 1.3 billion people are officially 96 percent Han; the rest range from Tibetans to Naxi to Manchus, categories fixed after the 1949 Communist revolution. The companies running the parks are generally Han-owned, say industry workers. The Dai park was started by a Han businessman from Guangdong Province in the late 1990s and sold to a state-run rubber company in 1999.
The most famous park, the Nationalities Park in Beijing, is a combination of museum and fairground. Ethnic workers from across China dress up in their native costumes for mostly Han tourists. (For a while, English signs there read “Racist Park,” an unfortunate translation of the Chinese name.) In some parks, Han workers dress up as natives — a practice given legitimacy by the government when Han children marched out in the costumes of the 55 minorities during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Yunnan, in the southwest, is one of China’s most diverse provinces, with 25 official ethnic groups. The Dai, one of the largest, are related to the Thai. Many live near Laos and Myanmar in the region called Xishuangbanna.
Dai farmers grow rice and have rubber plantations in the hills. Even in the Dai park, most villagers still farm rubber for their primary income. The villagers also make some money from leasing the land on which they live to Ganlanba Farm, the state-owned rubber company that operates the park.
In exchange, they have to follow rules laid down by the rubber company managers — no significant changes to their stilt homes, for example. By contrast, some villagers outside the park use brick and concrete to build homes now.
About 500 residents work here and put on the daily show, including water-splashing festivals and dragon boat races, held on a nearby stretch of the Mekong River.
Some tourists pay to sleep in family homes that stay true to Dai tradition.
“If you know how to run a business, you can benefit from the park,” said Ai Yo, a father of two who runs one of 27 official homestays. “But if you don’t do business, there’s no real benefit.”
Residents had become dissatisfied with the annual lease price for their land, he said. The rubber company was paying the villagers $73 a year per one-sixth of an acre. Only in recent months has the company agreed to pay about 20 percent more in rent.
Homestay owners have tossed out some traditions to meet the needs of Han tourists. The first tourists slept with their hosts on the floor of a large room, according to Dai custom, but visitors soon complained, Mr. Ai Yo said. So homeowners built separate bedrooms. Traditionally, too, the Dai were skittish about allowing strangers to look inside their bedrooms, because of a belief that the gaze of strangers would frighten away ancestral spirits.
Over all, though, he says tourism has bettered his life. “I had rice paddies, and I worked morning to night and didn’t seen any money,” he said while sitting outside his home one warm morning.
At another table outside were two Han tourists from the city of Chongqing. Zheng Jing, a big-bellied man wielding a Canon camera, was a repeat visitor. He said this park was the only place in the Dai region where he would ever consider staying.
“There are many villages around, and they’re all primitive,” he said as a Han motorcycle club pulled up to Mr. Ai Yo’s house for lunch. “It’s not suitable for us to go there. They don’t speak the Han language. You can’t have exchanges with them.”
That kind of attitude puzzles Dai residents living right outside the park.
“The culture here is the same as inside the park,” said Ai Yong, 32, a rubber farmer in Mannao village. “You’re getting cheated inside. You come out here, you can see everything for free.”
Watch How You Hold That Crayon
By PEG TYRE
NOAH LASCANO, 8, had a problem: His teachers couldn’t read his handwriting. His homework became a frustrating exercise in writing once, and then, at the teacher’s request, writing again, just for legibility.
His brother, James, 5, was struggling in kindergarten — even drawing stick figures was a task. When his mother, Paula Lascano, tried to cajole him into completing a few workbook assignments, he reported that “his hand got too tired.”
Like many parents, Ms. Lascano decided it was time for help, so 10 months ago she hired Casey Halper, a pediatric occupational therapist, to work first with James, and then with Noah, once a week. The boys manipulated stiff green putty, put pegs into boards, created chains of pennies and plastic connectors and wrote the alphabet — again and again.
These days, many little fingers are being drilled. Twenty-five years ago, pediatric occupational therapists primarily served children with severe disabilities like spina bifida, autism or cerebral palsy. Nowadays, these therapists are just as focused on helping children without obvious disabilities to hold a pencil.
In affluent neighborhoods in and around New York, occupational therapists have taken their place next to academic tutors, psychologists, private coaches and personal trainers — the army that often stands behind academically successful students.
Tim Nanof, legislative manager for the American Occupational Therapy Association, which has 38,000 members, said it’s hard to know exactly how many children are receiving these services. But parents, pediatricians, educators and early childhood experts agree that plenty of able-bodied children are receiving occupational therapy.
“Twenty years ago, you could find O.T.’s working with children at hospitals or schools for the blind or the deaf,” said Christine Berg, who oversees the curriculum for the Program in Occupational Therapy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Now, many pediatric O.T.’s see their role as promoting fitness and enhancing kids’ performance in school.”
Pediatric occupational therapy may be something like Pilates for the pint-size set — a regime of techniques that promise to bestow unique benefits on the practitioner. Or, like the increase in neuropsychological testing and in the use of drugs to enhance a child’s attention, the increase in therapy could suggest something may have gone awry in schools, in our level of academic expectations or perhaps in childhood itself.
“On one hand, I think it’s perfectly in line with the contemporary trend for parents and educators to seek high-priced specialists to treat the routine problems of childhood,” said Dr. Philippa Gordon, a popular pediatrician in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who is a medical adviser to the highly opinionated Park Slope Parents Web site. “On the other hand, I see that early intervention can keep little problems from becoming big ones.”
Linda Florin, who runs a private concierge service in Manhattan, paid a therapist $125 a week for nearly three years to help her son, Wyatt, now a first grader at Columbia Prep, improve his hand strength and control a pencil. She says it was money well spent. “School isn’t easy and it gets harder as they get older,” Ms. Florin said. “I wanted him to be able to keep up with everyone else.”
She also said the stigma is gone: “Back when I was a child, seeing an O.T.? Forget it. That was for kids who had spinal cord injuries.” Last year, she said, so many friends from her social circle were taking their children to occupational therapists that it seemed like a part of normal childhood.
“Seeing an O.T. was once an admission that something was seriously wrong with your child,” said Paula McCreedy, who, with her partner, Prudence Heisler, opened a branch of their busy Greenwich Village practice in Brooklyn Heights in part to meet the growing demand of private paying families seeking therapy. These days, she said, “many parents are finding that pediatric occupational therapists can help their children to be the best that they can be.”
In Manhattan, the brutally competitive nursery and kindergarten admissions process is leading many parents to sign up their toddlers for therapy. “Preschool admissions tests loom large,” said Margie Becker-Lewin, an occupational therapist on the Upper West Side. “In many cases, parents know there is nothing wrong with their child, but they feel caught in the middle.”
Their child might be exhibiting a minor fine-motor delay at a play group, she added, “and the parents understand that as the children get involved in the admissions process that there is not as much tolerance for a range of abilities as there once was.”
One father on the Upper East Side said anxiety about his son’s grip — his 3-year-old holds crayons in his fist — propelled him to seek therapy.
“The nursery admission people tell you they want your child to be ready to learn how to write,” said the father, who spoke anonymously so his son wouldn’t run afoul of nursery school administrators. “And I knew they would take one look at the way my son held a crayon and he’d be out of the running.”
The father pointed out that many families use occupational therapists to help their children gain admission to elite schools. “Even with the economy like it is, the hottest question when we socialized at our country house this summer was not what country club do you belong to, but who is your child’s O.T. back in the city. And how can I get an appointment?”
For some grade-school children, occupational therapists are also filling the void left by schools, many of which no longer provide instruction on the mechanics of handwriting. According to a survey conducted by the American Occupational Therapy Association, about 30 percent of their members now work in schools, up from 18.6 percent in 1999. Those therapists, said Ms. Berg of Washington University, tend to spend the bulk of their time helping children write legibly.
“Many teachers don’t know how to do it,” Ms. Berg said. “O.T.’s can help.”
Linda Tulloch waited in vain for teachers at the North Street School, a public elementary school in Greenwich, Conn., to provide her son, Jack, now a fifth grader, with handwriting instruction. “As early as second grade I could see he needed help shaping his letters and numbers,” she said.
But Jack’s teachers told her that handwriting was old school and that students would wield a keyboard, not a pencil. “That didn’t sit well with me,” Ms. Tulloch said. “Kids can’t use a keyboard to take a test or do math.” Ultimately, Ms. Tulloch hired a tutor, who uses a handwriting program, Handwriting Without Tears, designed by an occupational therapist.
Steve Sanders, director of the University of South Florida School of Physical Education and Exercise Science, also points to ramped-up expectations. “I’d say schools that push serious academics into kindergarten and pre-school — and emphasize sitting at desks and learning — are creating some of this problem,” he said.
But Anthony DiCarlo, the longtime principal of the William E. Cottle Elementary School in Tuckahoe, N.Y., a suburb north of Manhattan, said that many children are experiencing delays in their fine and gross motor skills.
“Almost all our kids come into kindergarten able to recite their letters and their numbers,” Mr. DiCarlo said. “Some can even read. But in the last five years, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of kids who don’t have the strength in their hands to wield a scissors or do arts and crafts projects, which in turn prepares them for writing.”
Many kindergartners in his community, he said, have taken music appreciation classes or participated in adult-led sports teams or yoga. And most have also logged serious time in front of a television or a computer screen. But very few have had unlimited opportunities to run, jump and skip, or make mud pies and break twigs. “I’m all for academic rigor,” he said, “but these days I tell parents that letting their child mold clay, play in the sand or build with Play-Doh builds important school-readiness skills, too.”
The problem has become so acute that two years ago, Mr. DiCarlo hired a full-time occupational therapist to work with the 500 students in his elementary school. The therapist, Deirdre Madden, spends 40 percent of her day with children who have diagnosed disabilities, and the rest of her time improving the fine motor skills and muscle control of the rest of the students.
“In my previous job I was working with children who had much more severe disabilities, and I couldn’t really see what role I’d have in a regular school,” Ms. Madden said. “But it turns out that many of the children here needed more support. And I’m only too happy to help.”
One about the troubles of taking the census in NYC
New York’s Nooks Are a Challenge to Census Takers
By SAM ROBERTS
One River Place blends easily into the dense forest of Manhattan skyscrapers, its vanity address camouflaging its precise location. Still, even in New York City, a 40-story tower containing 900 apartments should be difficult to miss.
But the Census Bureau did.
The apartment building at 500 12th Avenue, between 41st and 42nd Streets, was one of the first residential developments on the western fringes of Hell’s Kitchen when it opened in 2000. It was so far west, in fact, that it never showed up on the residential property map the bureau prepared for the 2010 census.
New York City planners discovered the oversight and alerted the bureau. Likewise, the city told the bureau about two nearby 60-story buildings with a total of 1,400 apartments that opened last spring after the bureau had finished compiling addresses for this census.
As the federal Census Bureau starts its most ambitious effort ever to count the country, no other city presents a bigger challenge than New York, with its huge immigrant population crammed into easily missed and often illegal nooks and crannies.
In all, the city has provided Census officials the addresses of at least 127,000 apartments or homes — nearly 4 percent of all the housing in the city — that the bureau did not have. Most of the addresses are in one-, two- and three-family homes that had been subdivided, legally and illegally.
A decade ago, 55 percent of the census forms in New York were sent back, compared with the national rate of 67 percent. In some city neighborhoods, the response rate was less than 40 percent.
“As a place of unparalleled population diversity and an eclectic mix of housing types, New York City has always been hard to count,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division of New York’s Department of City Planning. “This is especially true in the last decade, when the city experienced voluminous housing growth.”
The 2010 count of New York has not officially begun, but city demographers have already discovered about 300,000 people, including the tenants of those three Manhattan buildings, whom the bureau might have missed because it did not have their addresses.
They have also highlighted neighborhoods — including Washington Heights in Manhattan, Astoria in Queens and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn — where roughly 600,000 immigrants who arrived over the last decade have settled and how to find them.
Dozens of city workers have fanned out across the city, tallying mailboxes and doorbells on hundreds of homes where multiple families might be living or where tenants might be squirreled away in illegally converted attics and basements. The Census Bureau needs to “see behind the door,” Dr. Salvo said.
The decennial census is about a lot more than counting heads. The count is vital in reapportioning Congressional and state legislative districts, and in the distribution of billions of dollars in federal aid. This year, everyone will get the same form with just 10 questions, including the names and the number of household residents, their age, sex and race and if they are of Hispanic origin.
The questionnaires will be mailed to more than three million New York households in about two weeks and are due back by April 1. Filling out such a short form and returning it in a prepaid envelope might seem simple enough (and takes less time, the bureau says, than hard-boiling an egg).
But mindful of the obstacles, the Census Bureau and New York City officials have embarked on an unprecedented cooperative campaign to increase compliance.
The bureau’s New York regional office has hired 70 workers to reach out to ethnic groups, clergy members and civic groups to help promote the count. It has rolled out a media blitz that includes billboards and vans that have traveled throughout the city. And the bureau is coordinating closely with Dr. Salvo and Stacey Cumberbatch, who is the city’s full-time census coordinator.
Her office has reached out to groups like the United African Congress and the Y.M.C.A.’s New Americans Initiative to brief recent immigrants about the importance of the census.
Beginning in late March, the Census Bureau will provide Ms. Cumberbatch with real-time questionnaire return rates by neighborhood so she can dispatch follow-up teams.
“It is essential that New York City receive an accurate census count, because the census is statistical reality — a reality that will define us for the next 10 years,” Dr. Salvo said. “If you’re missed in the census enumeration, it’s like you don’t exist.”
The city and the Census Bureau hope to avoid a repeat of the 1990 census, when the city challenged the count and the bureau acknowledged that it had missed more than 240,000 New Yorkers.
Because the bureau relies, in part, on the previous census in compiling its list of residential addresses, its records are often outdated. In some cases, people are living at street addresses, like Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan over former railyards in the West 60s and 70s, that did not even exist in 2000.
This time the bureau is aiming for a questionnaire return rate in New York of 70 percent.
“There are some census tracts that could easily meet that, like the Upper East Side, where there are homeowners, English speakers,” said Lester A. Farthing, the bureau’s New York regional director. “Our biggest challenge is working on tracts where the mail response was low. You need to saturate New York to get the word out.”
The bureau will open sites throughout the city to help people fill out the questionnaires and to provide forms in various languages — the mailed forms are in English or, in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, in English and Spanish. One key message: None of the information is shared with any other government agencies.
“Our greatest challenge is trying to convince the majority of the foreign-born population that the census is safe, that you’re not going to be hurt or harmed,” Mr. Farthing said.
The bureau is concentrating on neighborhoods that are considered hard to count because residents are disproportionately poor, unemployed, live in apartment buildings, have no telephones, have moved there recently or are single parents.
People who do not respond to the survey will get a follow-up form, and if they ignore that, they will get a visit from an enumerator or census taker; 40,000 were hired in New York in 2000.
“If you’re worried about someone coming to your door,” Mr. Farthing said, “the answer is, mail it back.”
The City Planning Department has been so aggressive in pursuing people the census might miss that demographers have dubbed it “the Salvo effect.” Acting as human bloodhounds, 60 agency workers have spent part of the past three years combing through records and conducting on-site inspections.
“It’s amazing how many cable TV lines go into a house where one family supposedly lives,” Dr. Salvo said.
In 2000, the city’s population officially topped eight million for the first time, thanks largely to the Salvo effect. In 2008, the population stood at 8,363,710, according to the bureau’s annual American Community Survey. Dr. Salvo expects the 2010 census to record 8.4 million residents.
To find overlooked New Yorkers, researchers even considered using water bills to estimate how many times toilets were flushed and gauge population based on average human needs. But, Dr. Salvo said, “That is too unreliable, from an empirical standpoint.”
And this one: China’s Han Flock to Theme Parks Featuring Minorities
It has pictures
China’s Han Flock to Theme Parks Featuring Minorities
By EDWARD WONG
MANZHA, China — Tucked away in China’s steamy tropical southwest are the villages of the Dai people, famous throughout the country for a raucous annual tradition: a water-splashing festival where the Dai douse one another for three days in the streets using any container they can get their hands on — buckets, wash basins, teacups, balloons, water guns.
But in Manzha and four surrounding villages, the springtime festival has taken on added significance — or insignificance, depending on how you look at it. Imagine a nonstop Mardi Gras with fire hoses: at a site called the Dai Minority Park, water-splashing extravaganzas take place every day.
Yuppies from China’s boom cities arrive by the busload to take part in a wild frenzy of dousing and dunking and drenching with 100 Dai women dressed in bright pink, yellow and blue traditional dresses — “our warmest and sweetest Dai princesses,” as an announcer calls them.
“A lot of tourists want to come see this, but it’s only a few days a year,” said Zhao Li, one of the management office employees, who are virtually all Han, the dominant ethnic group in China. “So we decided to make it every day, so everyone can experience water splashing.”
The Dai park, with its wooden stilt homes, groomed palm trees and elephant statues, is part of an increasingly popular form of entertainment in China — the ethnic theme playground, where middle-class Han come to experience what they consider the most exotic elements of their vast nation. There is no comprehensive count of these Disneyland-like parks, but people in the industry say the number is growing, as are visitors. The Dai park, whose grounds encompass 333 actual Dai households, attracts a half-million tourists a year paying $15 each.
The parks are money-making ventures. But scholars say they also serve a political purpose — to reinforce the idea that the Chinese nation encompasses 55 fixed ethnic minorities and their territories, all ruled by the Han.
“They’re one piece in the puzzle of the larger project of how China wants to represent itself as a multiethnic state,” said Thomas S. Mullaney, a historian at Stanford University who studies China’s ethnic taxonomy. “The end goal is political, which is territorial unity. Parks like that, even if they’re kitschy, kind of like Legoland, they still play and occupy a political position.”
China’s 1.3 billion people are officially 96 percent Han; the rest range from Tibetans to Naxi to Manchus, categories fixed after the 1949 Communist revolution. The companies running the parks are generally Han-owned, say industry workers. The Dai park was started by a Han businessman from Guangdong Province in the late 1990s and sold to a state-run rubber company in 1999.
The most famous park, the Nationalities Park in Beijing, is a combination of museum and fairground. Ethnic workers from across China dress up in their native costumes for mostly Han tourists. (For a while, English signs there read “Racist Park,” an unfortunate translation of the Chinese name.) In some parks, Han workers dress up as natives — a practice given legitimacy by the government when Han children marched out in the costumes of the 55 minorities during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Yunnan, in the southwest, is one of China’s most diverse provinces, with 25 official ethnic groups. The Dai, one of the largest, are related to the Thai. Many live near Laos and Myanmar in the region called Xishuangbanna.
Dai farmers grow rice and have rubber plantations in the hills. Even in the Dai park, most villagers still farm rubber for their primary income. The villagers also make some money from leasing the land on which they live to Ganlanba Farm, the state-owned rubber company that operates the park.
In exchange, they have to follow rules laid down by the rubber company managers — no significant changes to their stilt homes, for example. By contrast, some villagers outside the park use brick and concrete to build homes now.
About 500 residents work here and put on the daily show, including water-splashing festivals and dragon boat races, held on a nearby stretch of the Mekong River.
Some tourists pay to sleep in family homes that stay true to Dai tradition.
“If you know how to run a business, you can benefit from the park,” said Ai Yo, a father of two who runs one of 27 official homestays. “But if you don’t do business, there’s no real benefit.”
Residents had become dissatisfied with the annual lease price for their land, he said. The rubber company was paying the villagers $73 a year per one-sixth of an acre. Only in recent months has the company agreed to pay about 20 percent more in rent.
Homestay owners have tossed out some traditions to meet the needs of Han tourists. The first tourists slept with their hosts on the floor of a large room, according to Dai custom, but visitors soon complained, Mr. Ai Yo said. So homeowners built separate bedrooms. Traditionally, too, the Dai were skittish about allowing strangers to look inside their bedrooms, because of a belief that the gaze of strangers would frighten away ancestral spirits.
Over all, though, he says tourism has bettered his life. “I had rice paddies, and I worked morning to night and didn’t seen any money,” he said while sitting outside his home one warm morning.
At another table outside were two Han tourists from the city of Chongqing. Zheng Jing, a big-bellied man wielding a Canon camera, was a repeat visitor. He said this park was the only place in the Dai region where he would ever consider staying.
“There are many villages around, and they’re all primitive,” he said as a Han motorcycle club pulled up to Mr. Ai Yo’s house for lunch. “It’s not suitable for us to go there. They don’t speak the Han language. You can’t have exchanges with them.”
That kind of attitude puzzles Dai residents living right outside the park.
“The culture here is the same as inside the park,” said Ai Yong, 32, a rubber farmer in Mannao village. “You’re getting cheated inside. You come out here, you can see everything for free.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-27 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-27 06:48 pm (UTC)The mind boggles.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-27 08:09 pm (UTC)(Of course, it's possible to both be rich AND to have a kid who actually needs OT.)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 01:06 am (UTC)