Some articles
May. 13th, 2012 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyAn Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time
An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer took their stations, behind tables covered in red gingham. Screwdrivers and sewing machines stood at the ready. Coffee, tea and cookies circulated. Hilij Held, a neighbor, wheeled in a zebra-striped suitcase and extracted a well-used iron. “It doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “No steam.”
Ms. Held had come to the right place. At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.
Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.
“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.
“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”
Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.
“Sustainability discussions are often about ideals, about what could be,” Ms. Postma said. “After a certain number of workshops on how to grow your own mushrooms, people get tired. This is very hands on, very concrete. It’s about doing something together, in the here and now.”
While the Netherlands puts less than 3 percent of its municipal waste into landfills, there is still room for improvement, according to Joop Atsma, the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment.
“The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,” Mr. Atsma wrote in an e-mail.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Han van Kasteren, a professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology who works on waste issues. “The social effect alone is important. When you get people together to do something for the environment, you raise consciousness. And repairing a vacuum cleaner is a good feeling.”
That was certainly true for the woman who brought her 40-year-old vacuum, bought when she was a newlywed, to a Tuesday night Repair Cafe. “I am very glad, very glad,” she said as John Zuidema, 70, sawed off the vacuum’s broken nozzle. “My husband died, and there are all these little things around the house that he used to fix.”
To some, the project’s social benefits are as appealing as its ecological mission. “What’s interesting for us is that it creates new places for people to meet, not just live next to each other like strangers,” said Nina Tellegen, the director of the DOEN Foundation, which provided the Repair Cafe with a grant of more than $260,000 as part of its “social cohesion” program, initiated in the wake of the political murders of Pim Fortuyn, a politician, in 2002, and Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker, in 2004. “That it’s linked to sustainability makes it even more interesting.”
Ms. Tellegen added that older people in particular find a niche at the Repair Cafe.
“They have skills that have been lost,” she said. “We used to have a lot of people who worked with their hands, but our whole society has developed into something service-based.”
Evelien H. Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, agreed. “It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Tonkens, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism.
“It’s definitely not a business model,” Ms. Postma said. She added that because the Repair Cafe caters to people who find it too expensive to have their items fixed, it should not compete with existing repair shops.
The Repair Cafe Foundation provides interested groups with information to help get them started, including lists of tools, tips for raising money and marketing materials. Ms. Postma has received inquiries from France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Africa and Australia.
Tijn Noordenbos, a 62-year-old artist in Delft, started a Repair Cafe there four months ago.
“I like to repair things,” he said, noting that the repair shops of his younger days had all but vanished. “Now, if something breaks, you take it back to the store and they say: ‘We’ll send it to the factory and it costs you 100 euros just to check out the problem. It’s better if you buy a new one.’ ”
William McDonough, an architect, said, “What happened with planned obsolescence is that it became mindless — just throw it away and don’t think about it.” His “cradle to cradle” design philosophy, which posits that things should be built so that they can be taken apart and the raw materials reused (though not necessarily repaired ad nauseam), also inspired Ms. Postma.
“The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them,” Mr. McDonough said.
Take, for example, Sigrid Deters’s black H&M miniskirt with a hole in it.
“This cost 5 or 10 euros,” about $6.50 to $13, she said, adding that she had not mended it herself because she was too clumsy. “It’s a piece of nothing, you could throw it out and buy a new one. But if it were repaired, I would wear it.”
Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”
Theo van den Akker, an accountant by day, had taken on the case of the nonsteaming iron. Wearing a T-shirt that read “Mr. Repair Café,” Mr. van den Akker removed the plastic casing, exposing a nest of multicolored wires.
As he did, Ms. Held and Ms. van der Rhee discussed the traditional Surinamese head scarves that Ms. Held, who was born in Suriname, makes for a living.
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.
An article on race and NYC schools
IN seventh-grade English class, sun leaked in through the windows. Horns bleated outside. The assignment was for the arrayed students to identify a turning point in their lives. Was it positive or negative? They hunched over and wrote fervidly.
Floriande Augustin, a first-year teacher at the school, invited students to share their choices. Hands waved for attention. One girl said it was when she got a cat, though she was unsure why. Another selected a car crash. A third brought up the time when her cousin got shot and “it was positive because he felt his life was crazy and he went to college so he couldn’t get shot anymore.”
The lesson detoured into Martin Luther King Jr. and his turning points. Ms. Augustin listed things like how his father took him shopping for shoes and they were made to wait in the back. How a bus driver told him to relinquish his seat to a white passenger and stand in the rear. How he wasn’t allowed to play with his white friends once he started school, because he went to a black school and his white friends went to a white school.
The students scribbled notes. Unmentioned was a ticklish incongruity that hung glaringly obvious in the air. This classroom at Explore Charter School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was full of black students in a school almost entirely full of black students. As Ms. Augustin, who is also black, later reflected, “There was something about, ‘Huh, here we are talking about that and look at us — we’re all the same.’ ”
In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school system looms as one of the most segregated. While the city’s public-school population looks diverse — 40.3 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14.9 percent white and 13.7 percent Asian — many of its schools are nothing of the sort.
About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic. Explore Charter is one of them: of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian. There is a good deal of cultural diversity, with students, for instance, of Haitian, Guyanese and Nigerian heritage. But not of class. Nearly 80 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunch, a mark of poverty. The school’s makeup is in line with charter schools nationally, which are over all less integrated than traditional public schools.
At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.
The school’s enrollment is even more racially lopsided than its catchment area. Students are chosen by lottery, with preference given to District 17, its community school district, which encompasses neighborhoods like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Crown Heights and Farragut. Census data for District 17 put the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade population at 75 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 1 percent Asian. But the white students go elsewhere — many to yeshivas or other private schools.
Tim Thomas, a fund-raiser who is white and lives in Flatbush, writes a blog called The Q at Parkside, about the neighborhood. He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”
Decades of academic studies point to the corroding effects of segregation on students, especially minorities, both in diminished academic performance and in the failure to equip them for the interracial world that awaits them.
“The preponderance of evidence shows that attending schools that are diverse has positive effects on children throughout the grades, and it grows over time,” said Roslyn Mickelson, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has reviewed hundreds of studies of integrated schooling. “To put it another way, the problems of segregation are accentuated over time,” she said.
Even if a segregated school provides a solid education, studies suggest, students are at a disadvantage. “What is a good education?” Dr. Mickelson said. “That you scored well on a test?”
One way race presents itself at Explore is in the makeup of the teaching staff. It is 61 percent white and 35 percent black, a sensitive subject among many students and parents who would prefer more black teachers. Most of the administration and central staff members — including the school’s founder, the current principal, the upper-school’s academic head and the lower-school’s academic head, as well as the high school counselor and social worker — are white.
As Ms. Augustin said: “When I came here and started to talk about myself, the students were shocked that I was here. I started to wonder, did they really have role models?”
AFTER school one Tuesday, 10 students assembled in a classroom to talk about the school and race. The school paid for snacks: Doritos and Oreo cookies, Coke and 7Up.
What did they think of the absence of racial diversity?
“It doesn’t really prepare us for the real world,” said Tori Williams, an eighth grader. “You see one race, and you’re going to be accustomed to one race.”
Jahmir Duran-Abreu, another eight grader, said: “It seems it’s black kids and white teachers. Like one time we were talking and I said I like listening to Eminem and my teacher said this was ghetto. She was white. I was pretty upset. I was wondering why she would say something like that. She apologized, but it sticks with me.”
Jahmir, one of Explore’s few Hispanic students, is its first student to get into Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s premier schools. He was also admitted to Dalton, an elite private school, where he intends to go. He wants someday to become an actor.
Shakeare Cobham, in sixth grade, offered a different view: “It’s more comfortable to be with people of your own race than to be with a lot of different races.”
Tori came back: “I disagree. It doesn’t prepare us.”
Yata Pierre, in eighth grade, said, “It doesn’t really matter as long as your teachers are good teachers.”
Trevon Roberts-Walker, a sixth grader, responded, “When we are in high school and college, it’s not going to be all one race.”
Jahmir: “Yeah, in my high school there will be predominantly white kids, and I think this school will be so much better if it were more diverse.”
Kenny Wright, in eighth grade, piped in, “You could have more discussion instead of all the same thoughts.”
Ashira Mayers, in seventh grade, said: “We’d like to hear from other races. How do they feel? What’s happening with them?”
Later on, Ashira elaborated: “We will sometimes talk about why don’t we have any white kids? We wonder what their schools are like. We see them on TV, with the soccer fields and the biology labs and all that cool stuff. Sometimes I feel I have to work harder because I don’t have all that they have. A lot of us think that way.”
EXPLORE’S founder, Morty Ballen, 42, grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, where his father ran several delis. A product of Teach for America, he taught English in a high school in Baton Rouge, La., that went from being all white to half-black. The white teachers would tell racist jokes in the faculty lounge, he said. He taught at an all-black school in South Africa started by a white woman, then at a largely black-and-Hispanic middle school on the Lower East Side. The experiences soaked in.
“I’m very cognizant of my whiteness, and that I have power,” he said. “I need to incorporate this reality in my leadership.”
He is also gay and knows about feeling different in school. “The only people who were like me were two kids who went to drugs,” he said. “One died in high school, and the other died recently.”
Mr. Ballen founded Explore in 2002, resolute that a public school could deliver a good education to disadvantaged students. He now leads a Brooklyn charter network. (His fourth school is scheduled to open in September.) The school began in Downtown Brooklyn. In 2004, it relocated to a former bakery factory in Flatbush, where most classrooms were windowless. In August, the Education Department moved it to 655 Parkside Avenue, squeezing it into the fourth floor and portions of the third in a building occupied by Middle School 2 and Public School K141, a special-education school.
The shared building is relatively new and in good shape, but the library is half the size of a classroom, the space so tight that a few thousand books must be kept in storage. The cafeteria, auditorium, gym and playground are shared. Instead of a computer lab, the school has a rolling computer cart of laptops, used mostly for math classes. There is no playground equipment for the younger grades. There are a limited number of musical instruments, so the school has no band, or much in the way of after-school athletics. There are no accelerated classes for high-performing students.
Explore students wear uniforms and have a longer school day and year than the students in the other schools in the building, schools with which they have a difficult relationship. A great deal of teaching is done to the state tests, the all-important metric by which schools are largely judged. In the hallway this spring, before the tests, a calendar counted down the days remaining until the next round.
Explore’s academic performance has been inconsistent. Last year, the school got its charter renewed for another five years, and this year, for the first time, three students, including Jahmir, got into specialized high schools. Yet, on Explore’s progress report for the 2010-11 school year, the Education Department gave it a C (after a B the previous year). In student progress, it rated a D.
“We weren’t doing right by our students,” Mr. Ballen said.
In response, a new literacy curriculum was introduced and greater emphasis was put on applauding academic achievement. School walls are emblazoned with motivational signs: “Getting the knowledge to go to college”; “When we graduate ... we are going to be doctors.” Teachers are encouraged to refer to students as “scholars.”
Convinced that student unruliness was impeding learning, the school installed a rigid discipline system. Infractions — for transgressions like calling out without permission, frowning after being given a demerit, being off task — lead to detention for upper-school students. On some days, 50 students land in detention, a quarter of the upper school.
Positive behavior does bring rewards, like making the Respect Corps, which allows a student to wear an honorary T-shirt. Winning an attendance contest can lead to treats for the class or the freedom to wear jeans.
Still, some students have taken to referring to Explore as “the prison school.”
OUT of uniform and barefoot, Amiyah Young was getting her books in order for homework. She was at home, two blocks from school, in an apartment she shares with her grandparents, mother and 2-year-old brother. She is in sixth grade, willowy, with watchful eyes, a dexterous thinker, one of the school’s top students. She hopes to go to a university like Princeton and become a veterinarian, because she has noticed lots of people own animals.
She blithely showed her snug room, a converted dining nook containing her bed, her books, her stuffed animals, her cluster of snow globes. She said that some of her friends slept with their mothers or siblings, or on the couch.
Her mother, Shonette Kingston, 36, calm with an outreaching smile, works as an operating-room technician and attends nursing school. She separated from Amiyah’s father when the girl was born. He is unemployed, and lives elsewhere in Brooklyn, but remains involved in her life.
“It’s a bit weird,” Amiyah said of the school’s racial composition. “All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”
Would it be better if it were integrated?
“I think they would stop calling me white girl if there were white kids,” she said. “Because my skin is a little lighter and I can’t dance, they call me that. Some of them can’t dance, either.”
What else?
“I could talk the way I talk.”
Other students speak street slang that she repudiates: “They will say to me, ‘You are so white.’ I tell them, I have two black parents. Do I look white?”
She had been having trouble making friends. This year, her mother noticed a speech change. “She’s slacking off more to fit in,” Ms. Kingston said. “She’s saying: ‘I been there.’ ‘I done that.’ ”
Amiyah confirmed this: “I speak a bit more freelance with my friends. Not full sentences. I don’t use big words. They hate it when I do that.”
She said she had become more popular.
Other students also relate the use of parlance linked to skin color. Shakeare Cobham, one of Amiyah’s friends, said: “If you’re darker, they’ll call them burnt. Light-skinned ones get called white.”
Zierra Page, who is in eighth grade, said: “The lighter-skinned girls think they’re prettier. They’ll say: ‘She’s mad dark. Look at me, I’m much prettier.’ ”
Amiyah’s parents are bothered by the abundance of white teachers. Her mother said: “What do they know of our lives? They may be good teachers, but what do they know? You’re coming from Milwaukee. You went to Harvard. Her dad complains about this all the time — what can they bring to these African-American kids? I’m trying to keep an open mind. I’m happy with the education.”
Amiyah said, “The white teachers can’t relate as much to us no matter how hard they try — and they really try.”
To extract her from the synthetic isolation of her environment, Amiyah’s parents have enrolled her in programs with more racial diversity like an acting class in Manhattan.
She is curious about better-off white children. “I’d like to see how they would react in the classroom when we have dance parties,” she said. “I’d like to see how they would react to a birthday party. And to being around so many of us. I’d like to see what they would think of some of the girls in our school who have big hair and those big earrings.”
Anything else?
She mulled that a moment, and said, “I wonder if it’s fun.”
EXPLORE’S administration neither encourages nor discourages discussion of race. Rarely is it openly examined.
A diversity task force was patched together over a year ago to look into things like how to bridge the divide among staff and students and their parents, and what the makeup of the staff should be. The group is preparing some recommendations.
Race, and its attendant baggage, of course, is a tricky subject. Teachers are of different minds about what to do with it.
Marc Engel, a former investment banker turned librarian and media coordinator at Explore, is 53 and white. He frets about power differentials and how to transcend race, how to steer the students’ inner compass. “I worry so much about their role models,” he said. “The rap stars. The fashion models. The basketball players.”
He has his way of trying to fit in. “I call every kid brother and sister,” he said. “I say, hey, brother; hey, sister. One kid once asked me, ‘Are you my uncle?’ ”
OTHER staff members also wonder about the isolation of the students. Adunni Clarke, 34, who is black and is the lead intervention teacher who helps students and teachers who need extra support, said: “I don’t know that our kids get their placement in the world. I don’t know that they realize that they’re competing against all these other cultures.”
Talking about race “could be a Pandora’s box to some extent,” said Corey Gray, 27, who is white and in his first year at Explore as an eighth-grade language-arts teacher. “Is there a proper effective way to bring it in? There probably is. Do I know the way? No, I don’t.”
Many of the teachers are young, from different backgrounds, and there is steady turnover — from 25 percent to 35 percent in each of the past three years, a persistent issue at charter and high-poverty schools.
Tracy Rebe, the principal, is leaving this year. Her replacement, the fourth in the school’s short history, will be the first black principal, though not by design.
Early in the year, Mauricia Gardiner, 30, who teaches fifth-grade math and is of mixed race, was listening as students read a story about a black teenager who tried to rob a woman. Instead of reporting him, the woman took him home and tried to set him straight. The woman’s race wasn’t mentioned.
Ms. Gardiner asked the class what race they imagined the woman to be. They said black, that no white woman would do that. Why? she asked.
“They would be scared of us,” a student said.
“It’s frustrating,” Ms. Gardiner said. “We don’t have a forum to address this. You can get all the education in the world. But you have to function in the world.”
Darren Nielsen, 25, white, from Salt Lake City, is in his second year teaching, assigned to third grade. Last year, when he taught fourth grade, a student got miffed at him and said, “Oh, this white guy.” He later spoke to the student about singling out someone in a negative way because of his or her race. He overheard students call one another “light-skinned crackers” and “dark-skinned crackers.”
“We had discussions about that being inappropriate,” Mr. Nielsen said. “I even said:I’m the lightest-skinned one of all. What does that make me?”
The discussion was quick. “I probably should have done more,” he said. “It was hard on me as a first-year teacher and not knowing what to do.”
He added: “I realize most of these kids are going to go to segregated schools until college. I wonder, am I preparing these kids for what goes on in college?”
Karen Hicks, 41, a former businesswoman who is now in her first year teaching fifth-grade math and science and is black, used to have a son in the school. “I would have put him in an integrated school if I had that option,” she said.
Ms. Hicks recalled her first conference as a parent, with a white teacher, now gone: “The teacher said, ‘Oh, you’re so involved.’ It felt patronizing. That should have been the expectation.”
IF anyone can relate to the students, it is James McDonald. Mr. McDonald, 41, black, the beloved gym teacher, has been with Explore since it opened. He grew up on the Lower East Side, where his father ran a liquor store and left home when Mr. McDonald was 9. He went to predominantly black and Latino schools, and says he didn’t learn what he needed to learn.
In high school, he showed a college application essay to a scholarship committee member, who told him, “If you want to go to college, you better learn how to spell it.” He had written “colledge.” He realized the holes in his education. “It deflated me,” he said.
He thinks Explore students are getting a much better education than he did. Still, he is concerned.
“Outside the school the kids are being reminded of what their race is,” he said. “When they come to school, it’s as if they are asked to ignore who they are.”
“I don’t see that a lot of them have aspirations to do great things,” he added. “Some of them say, yeah, I want to be a doctor. But some, you ask them and they don’t have an answer. I’d like to know how many actually believe they can do whatever they can.”
THE sixth-grade social studies students swept into Alexis Rubin’s classroom. She slapped them five, bid them good afternoon. To settle them down, Ms. Rubin said, “Students are earning demerits in one ... two ...”
She handed out a test on Colonial Williamsburg. She said, “Every scholar in this room will get a sheet of loose-leaf paper for your short response.”
Of Explore’s teachers, Ms. Rubin, 31, is perhaps the keenest about openly addressing race. She is in her third year at the school, is white and grew up on the Upper West Side.
Outside school, she is the co-chairperson of Border Crossers, an 11-year-old organization troubled by New York’s segregated system that instructs elementary-school teachers how to talk about race in the classrooms.
As Jaime-Jin Lewis, the organization’s executive director, puts it: “You don’t want kids learning about sex on the playground. You don’t want them to learn about race and class and power on the playground.”
Ms. Rubin does Border Crossers exercises with her students like MeMaps, in which both students and teachers list characteristics about themselves, then create a “diversity flower,” with petals listing each participant’s unique traits.
During Ms. Rubin’s first year at Explore, a parent called her up, screaming that she ignored her son and called only on the white students. Ms. Rubin pointed out that there actually weren’t any white students to call on.
She said schools needed to “unpack” the issue of race and dismantle stereotypes.
“The beginning is naming it,” she said.
A GAUZY night in early spring, and the PTA meeting in the auditorium drew about three dozen parents. Details were given about picture day, about students needing to show up for preparation for the state tests, about neighborhood ne’er-do-wells who tried to rob some students, MetroCards and hats their targets.
Lakisha Adams, 35, who has three children in the school, spoke brightly of a Harlem mentoring program: “It teaches about how to shake someone’s hand, how to walk without your pants dragging down. This is all black. We put our kids in a lot of programs with kids that don’t look like us. Our kids don’t relate to Great Neck.”
Parents say they like Explore over all and the education it offers. To many, that is enough.
Sheryl Davis, 57, the PTA president, grew up in Brooklyn, and when she was in sixth grade, was bused out of her mostly black East New York school to a “lily-white school.”
“I do remember the hate from the white students,” she said. The next year, she was back in her former school.
“As I got older, I didn’t really see that I gained from that experience,” she said.
“I don’t know that segregation is this horrible thing,” Ms. Adams said. “The problem with segregation is the assumption that black is bad and white is good. Black can be great. That’s what I instill my kids with.”
Would she prefer an integrated school? “I can’t say that I would.”
Families often disagree among themselves. Calandra Maijeh, 38, and her husband, Ife Maijeh, 43, were at the school one evening with their four children, all Explore students.
“Color for me is not an issue,” Ms. Maijeh said. “As long as the learning is up to par.”
Mr. Maijeh said: “My thoughts are very different from my wife. I agree that everybody deserves an education. But I want white and black to be together as one.”
Jean McCauley, 47, is a single mother with two sons by different fathers, both gone from her life. When her older son, now 26, began school, his father had a friend in TriBeCa, and they used his address to get him into Public School 234, a well-regarded, largely white school. “I feel so grateful for my son being in that environment,” she said. “Expectations were so high. That school had everything. It was a world apart.”
He graduated from college and works at a real estate agency.
For her younger son, Brandon Worrell, she didn’t have that option. He is in sixth grade at Explore. She considers it a good school, but fears he doesn’t learn racial tolerance. “At Explore he can’t compare to anything,” she said. “He won’t know how to communicate with other races. He won’t know there is a difference. I think color will always be the first thing he sees.”
She added, “I speak to Brandon about race. But he doesn’t get it. It’s abstract.”
A WEEK wound up. Education was occurring. In kindergarten, they were reading “Sheep Take a Hike,” while in first grade, students wrote about a small moment that happened to them. A girl wrote: “This morning my mom pulled out my tooth. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
In sixth-grade math, they were reviewing order of operations, and in fifth-grade science they were learning about chyme. In third grade, they were writing a response to: How does Jimmy feel about raising goats? Use at least two details in your answer.
A student was told: “You have the right to be mad. You don’t have the right to kick things.”
Mr. Engel, teaching library, went around the room with the first graders and had them fill in the blank of “America is...”
The answers shot back: “America is ... my mommy.”
“Pie.”
“Whipped cream.”
“Burger King”
“Our life.”
One on a pretty awesome 11 year old rock climber
With a concentrated squint, Ashima Shiraishi silently sized up her first rock of the day, a menacing slab of jagged beige boulder 20 feet high, scuffed by white chalk left behind from bigger, older, more experienced climbers.
A black crash pad as thick as a mattress was placed on the ground, and without a rope or harness for protection, Ashima shrugged off her purple jacket, hoisted herself onto the boulder and began to scramble up, her calf muscles bulging gently as she grabbed one nearly invisible ledge of rock after another. With a final stretch, she reached the top, her glossy black ponytail disappearing first, then one limb at a time, until she was out of sight.
A tiny voice floated over the top of the boulder. “How do you get down?” she said.
Ashima had just begun a two-week climbing expedition this spring at Hueco Tanks, a state park that is a mecca for bouldering enthusiasts, 860 acres of rock masses surrounded by endless desert and sky 30 miles northeast of El Paso.
Three days after she arrived, she stunned the bouldering world by climbing Crown of Aragorn, an exceedingly difficult route that requires climbers to contort their bodies and hang practically upside down by their fingers as they navigate a rock that juts out from the ground at a 45-degree angle.
On the scale of V0 to V16 that governs bouldering, Crown of Aragorn is a V13, a level that only a few female climbers had reached.
None were 10 years old, as she was.
Ashima, a petite girl with pale skin, a toothy smile and a thick fringe of bangs cut in a perfect line across her forehead, is not only the best climber her age in the United States, or maybe anywhere, but her accomplishments have already placed her among the elite in the sport.
In 2008, when she was only 7, she began sending problems — bouldering lingo for ascending routes — that some adult climbers could not handle.
On a trip to Hueco in 2010, she climbed a V10 called Power of Silence. The next year, she ascended a V11/12 called Chablanke.
At the American Bouldering Series Youth National Championship in Colorado Springs in March, she easily came in first place, all 4 feet 5 inches and 63 pounds of her.
Before finishing fifth grade, Ashima, who recently turned 11, is redefining what physical tools are required to be an elite climber and showing how a child can hold her own against professional climbers who are adults.
This summer, she will accompany a group of American climbers for an expedition in South Africa, where she will be the only child climber in the bunch.
“She’s this adorable little girl who climbs hard and cries when she doesn’t send,” said Andrew Tower, the editor in chief of Urban Climber magazine. “Her climbing I.Q. is so high, you show her how to do something and she soaks it up really quickly. She understands innately how to move.”
Unlikely Beginnings
It did not take a pro to see that there was something unusual going on at the time Ashima started climbing in 2007, when she was 6.
Her parents, Tsuya and Hisatoshi Shiraishi, had immigrated from Japan in 1978 and settled in a loft in Chelsea. When Ashima, their only child, was 2, they began taking her to Central Park in search of amusement.
One afternoon when Ashima was in kindergarten, they wandered over to Rat Rock, a boulder 15 feet high and 40 feet wide at the south end of the park that is a favorite spot for amateur climbers.
Ashima joined the other climbers and began to scurry up the rock without help, so focused on her climbing that she begged to stay at Rat Rock through the dinner hour. Finally, when it became so dark that Ashima could not see the rock anymore, they went home.
The Shiraishis were mystified. “We didn’t even know that climbing was a sport,” her father, Hisatoshi Shiraishi, said later.
But he knew that his little girl was good.
The Shiraishis went to Rat Rock almost daily, visits that stretched through the summer and into the fall. Ashima kept improving, climbing higher and faster, often attracting a crowd.
By November, it was becoming too cold to climb outside, and the Shiraishis started to worry. What were they going to do with her all winter?
Some bystanders in the park encouraged Hisatoshi Shiraishi, known as Poppo, to take Ashima to a proper climbing gym.
“They said, ‘You’re special,’ ” Ashima recalled, her voice trailing off with a shade of embarrassment. “They told me that I should be climbing at a gym, all the time.”
Climbing tends to attract outdoors types from Western states like Colorado, Montana and California. But every once in a while, “someone pops out of some crazy part of the U.S. and shows us all that it doesn’t much matter where you live,” Tower said, adding that the 19-year-old Sasha DiGiulian, one of the best female climbers in the world, is from the Washington suburbs.
Poppo had never heard of climbing gyms, and none of Ashima’s classmates were into climbing. But curious about the sport and happy to indulge Ashima, he took her to the Manhattan Plaza Health Club on the West Side.
“If it wasn’t for Rat Rock, I wouldn’t have found climbing,” Ashima said, smiling.
Soon, they fell into a rhythm: Ashima would climb nearly every day after school, with Poppo as her coach.
He did not know about rock climbing, but he knew how to move. He had been trained as a dancer, studying Butoh, a form developed in Japan a half-century ago that is influenced by German Expressionism. In New York, he performed in a group called Poppo and the Go-Go Boys, whose “strangely beautiful” routines sometimes ended with dances on and around toilet bowls, a finale that was “more than a prank,” an admiring review in The New York Times said in 1993.
In those days, Poppo the modern dancer and choreographer wore his hair in a triple Mohawk. Now he has toned it down a bit, but on a recent Saturday afternoon at the gym in New Rochelle, N.Y., where Ashima takes a private weekly lesson and participates in the occasional climbing competition, Poppo stood out among the suburban parents in khakis and J. Crew sweaters.
His hair, dyed canary yellow, was buzzed short on the sides and spiked on top. He wore designer eyeglasses and a light gray T-shirt decorated with neat rows of Japanese lettering. (They read, “Are you stupid?”)
Poppo, who has given up Butoh but still moves with the lithe ease of a dancer, watched Ashima intensely as she moved steadily up the wall.
When Ashima climbs, he said, he feels he is climbing with her.
“With dance, there is space all around you,” he said, spreading his arms wide and fluttering his fingers in a circle. “I teach her to think about the space around her when she is climbing.”
Child’s Advantage
Modern bouldering is not much older than Ashima. It reached widespread recognition only in the 1990s as a discipline of rock climbing, one that requires participants to climb without ropes or harnesses, on rocks that generally do not reach higher than 15 or 20 feet.
The sport favors the small rocks over the big ones, so it lacks the drama and death-defying heights of climbing mountains like Everest and K2. But its fans are drawn to bouldering for its spare quality, powerful movements and the simplicity of being unburdened and unaided by heavy equipment.
Very little gear is used, beyond a pair of light climbing shoes, a pouch of white chalk to keep the hands dry and a thick mattress, known as a crash pad, that lies beneath the climber.
During local competitions, a point value is assigned to each boulder problem based on how difficult it is. Athletes climb in isolation, without any verbal help from the ground.
According to the Outdoor Industry Association, 3.65 million people participated in sport, indoor and boulder climbing in 2011.
And as climbing has gained popularity, more children have tried it. One of the top children in the sport, a frequent competitor of Ashima’s, is Brooke Raboutou, the daughter of the former climbing champions Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou and Didier Raboutou.
Physically, children and teenagers may even have some advantages over adults: their small hands and feet allow them to use holds that adults cannot. Some experts have suggested that they bounce back more quickly from falls and injuries than adults do.
Ashima has not escaped injuries. Her knees are marked with scrapes and scabs. On her forehead is a faint yellow bruise, the size of a quarter, sustained during a climb at her gym in Brooklyn.
“I was trying to do a really big move and I hit my head,” she said.
Getting hurt does not seem to bother her.
“I don’t think about it,” she said. “I know how to fall.”
But the mental requirements of climbing are too much for many children to handle.
Up close, bouldering is slow, even ponderous, a sport that allows for long stretches of hanging out, talking with fellow climbers, sitting around and contemplating holds and pinches. A group of climbers might stay at one chunk of rock for hours, staring at it and plotting the smartest way up.
None of that seems to bore Ashima.
“When she’s climbing, she’s not a child,” Poppo said. “Her mentality is like a professional climber.” Obe Carrion, her private coach, calls it “the stone face” that she wears during competitions.
Kynan Waggoner, the director of operations for USA Climbing, the national governing body for the sport of competition climbing, said Ashima competed as if she were five years older than she is, mentally and physically. The children who excel at climbing, he added, tend to have an ability to concentrate that is beyond their years.
“The best young climbers climb like shrunken adults — they don’t move like children,” Waggoner said. “Their coordination is like a fully formed adult. Their balance is better; their agility is better. They just look like little men or little women. Everything is precise; everything is calculated. That’s how Ashima climbs.”
Not everyone in the bouldering universe is convinced of Ashima’s precociousness. On the Web, her climbs have been questioned by anonymous commenters who have suggested — unfairly, according to the evidence — that she has cut corners.
Doubters have said Ashima could not possibly have climbed what she did, but other climbers have come to her defense.
“These anonymous trolls may have to eat their words,” a blog post on dpmclimbing.com read last year, noting that two days into a trip to Hueco in 2011, Ashima tackled two more difficult boulder problems, with plenty of witnesses around.
Commute to Climbing
Climbing is pretty much the only thing that holds Ashima’s interest for long. Television, movies and computers are not a big part of her day, partly because the Waldorf school she attends has a philosophy that includes a general distaste for technology.
She collects handmade Japanese stickers, which she keeps in a scrapbook, and her favorite subjects are gym and woodworking, where she learned to make a cutting board and a salad spoon and fork.
And though she is as smiley and goofy as the next fifth grader, Ashima shuns the typical pink-laden world of many of her schoolgirl friends. Carrion, 35, likes to tease her that her big reward for all this climbing is a trip to Disney World to check out the princesses, a suggestion that makes her wrinkle her nose in disgust.
“She’s never been a girlie girl,” said her aunt Kay Horikawa, who attends her competitions faithfully and watches her practice. “She’s never had a Barbie.”
What Ashima does have is a steely focus that is unusual for someone her age.
Competitions have been part of her climbing repertory since she was 7, and for the last three years, she has won the national youth bouldering championships, the biggest contest in the sport.
She insists on climbing nearly every day, in a rigorous schedule that takes her directly from school, the Rudolf Steiner school on the Upper East Side, to the gym in Brooklyn where she trains, Brooklyn Boulders.
From Monday through Friday, she and Poppo take a crosstown bus to the West Side, then a D train to Brooklyn Boulders in Gowanus, where she practices from 4 to 7:30 p.m. Another hour of travel, and they are back home in Chelsea for dinner, usually something Japanese like ramen noodles, and homework. (Wednesday afternoons are reserved for lessons at a Japanese school, where she is drilled in language and culture.)
On Saturdays, Ashima often goes back to Brooklyn Boulders, and on Sundays she rides Metro-North with Poppo to New Rochelle for her lesson with Carrion.
During a recent competition there in traditional climbing, which she mixes in with her training in bouldering, she scaled a wall almost 45 feet high with astonishing speed, causing other parents to glance away from their own children and watch Ashima.
“Beautiful climb!” one mother shouted from the ground as Ashima reached the top.
Taking a break afterward, she flopped down on a squishy blue mat next to two climbers, 18-year-old girls with muscular shoulders and biceps, who greeted her by name. Her peers among fellow 11-year-olds are few. “I hang out with older kids a lot,” Ashima said, stretching her legs in front of her.
Bouldering Vacation
Indoor climbing is a necessity during much of the year in the chilly Northeast. But Ashima longs to be outside climbing on real rock, a more unstructured approach that allows climbers to navigate rock by identifying holds that occur naturally, rather than their artificial replicas bolted to an indoor climbing wall.
While some children her age might beg their parents to take them to a beach or an amusement park for spring break, Ashima asked her parents if she could fly to El Paso with Carrion, a former pro climber, for a two-week climbing expedition in Hueco.
They arrived for the trip together, along with her aunt, Horikawa, a music engineer whose flexible schedule allows her to travel with Ashima.
Hueco is most definitely a place that was designed for grown-ups. Many out-of-town climbers stay at the Hueco Rock Ranch, an inn and campground with a grungy hippie vibe where the best rooms go for $60 a night.
Climbing routes in the park have names that seem to have been dreamed up by macho 20-something men: So Damn Insane, Dirty Martini on the Rocks, Girls of Juarez.
Gray foxes, bobcats and roadrunners roam the Chihuahuan Desert, which is a sunny paradise one moment and a swirl of choking dust the next.
But the bouldering in this part of the country is magnificent. Approaching the entrance of the park in a packed sport utility vehicle, Ashima was squirming with excitement.
“This is my favorite place to climb, the best place to climb,” she said. “I just can’t wait to get out there.”
Even outside El Paso, 2,000 miles from New York, Ashima is a celebrity.
On the trails, a 40-something man walked by with his son, who was about Ashima’s age, glanced at her. The two doubled back.
“Introduce yourself to her,” the father whispered to his son, who nervously approached, said hello and then ducked away in shyness.
After doing a few warm-up climbs, Ashima, Carrion and the group headed over to Crown of Aragorn, the V13 that Ashima was determined to tackle on this trip.
After she made a few failed attempts, and some clumsy falls off the boulder, frustration set in.
A dust storm had kicked up, sending sand in her eyes, mouth and ears. She walked over to a mat. Sitting on the ground eating string cheese and sipping a drink, she waited for a break in the wind. Carrion crouched down to give her a pep talk. “You don’t want to be a one-sided climber,” he said. “You’re not weak, you’re strong as hell.”
A few minutes later, she was back on the boulder but fell off again. Still, she refused to call it a day.
Her aunt whispered from the sidelines. “She doesn’t like to quit,” she said.
Three hours after she approached Crown of Aragorn, Ashima finally gave up, but Carrion sensed his pupil would be back. “She’ll send it,” he said.
Two days later, she did, earning immediate accolades from pro climbers two or three times her age.
“The day she did that, I just wrote on Facebook, ‘Ashima is my hero,’ ” said Angie Payne, 27, the first female pro to climb a V13, two years ago, the same level of difficulty that Ashima has just achieved.
“She’s pushing standards in the adult world,” Payne said. “She’s right at the edge of what adults have climbed and she’s on track to take it to a completely different level, assuming she still loves it in 10 years. I really hope she does because it would be really cool to see what she can do.”
Ashima says she has no doubt about that. After high school, she wants to be a pro climber. She already has a running start.
And weeks after sending Crown of Aragorn, Ashima said she had surprised even herself.
“It felt so good,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do it. Next year, I want to do something even harder.”
Solar Installers Offer Deals, Gaining Converts
Jay Nuzzi, a New Jersey state trooper, had put off installing solar panels on his home here for years, deterred by the $70,000 it could cost. Then on a trip to Home Depot, he stumbled across a booth for Roof Diagnostics, which offered him a solar system at a price he couldn’t refuse: free.
Mr. Nuzzi had to sign a 20-year contract to buy electricity generated by the roof panels, which he would not own. But the rates were well below what he was paying to the local utility. “It’s no cost to the homeowner — how do you turn it down?” Mr. Nuzzi said on a recent overcast morning as a crew attached 41 shiny black modules to his roof. “It was a no-brainer.”
Similar deals are being struck with tens of thousands of homeowners and businesses across the country. Installers, often working through big-box chains like Home Depot or Lowe’s, are taking advantage of hefty tax breaks, creative financing techniques and a glut of cheap, Chinese-made panels to make solar power accessible to the mass market for the first time. The number of residential and commercial installations more than doubled over the last two years to 213,957, according to Greentech Media, a research firm.
Major players in the installation business, like SolarCity, Sunrun and Sungevity, are thriving even as the other side of the industry — solar module makers — has been squeezed to the breaking point by fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers. In a case to be decided later this month, a coalition of solar manufacturers has asked the United States government to impose steep duties on the imports, arguing that the Chinese companies are violating international trade rules.
“You hear a lot of the gloom and doom about the industry and, you know, ‘The manufacturers are losing jobs, they’re shutting down,’ but if you look at where the actual money is in these systems and where the jobs are, it’s really in the installation,” said Lynn Jurich, Sunrun’s president.
Big corporations like Google, U.S. Bancorp, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch see the potential for steady profits in rooftop solar projects and have been supplying the capital to help cover the upfront costs, which typically run $30,000 or more for a single-family home. The investors say they believe the returns, generally 7 to 13 percent, are relatively safe because the solar providers generally sign up only homeowners and businesses with solid credit. In addition, installers say that people tend to pay their electric bills even when facing other financial problems.
“We have customers that are foreclosed,” said Lyndon Rive, chief executive of SolarCity, one of the largest installers. “They’re still paying their electric bill so they still pay us.”
The company has raised more than $1.4 billion to finance its projects and is so confident in its future that it is planning an initial public offering of its stock. The company has declined to comment on the stock offering.
Industry executives even predict that solar leases could one day be bundled and sold as securities like mortgages and other loans.
Some analysts caution that despite all the activity, the sector still faces hurdles, like the high costs of bringing in new customers and getting financing. “It’s not clear to me that anyone yet has cracked the code of scaling the business massively,” said Dickon Pinner, co-author of a recent McKinsey report on the industry.
Solar customers can finance their systems in a variety of ways. Businesses often purchase them outright so that they can reap the savings and take advantage of tax incentives and depreciation.
But homeowners are increasingly choosing to avoid the upfront costs. In California, the country’s largest market, more than 70 percent of residential customers putting in solar this year have opted to sign a lease or power purchase agreement with someone else owning the systems, according to PV Solar Report.
The structure of the deals varies by company and state, but the overall approach is generally the same: Customers agree to pay a fixed monthly charge or rate for all the solar power produced, and the companies that finance the systems pay for the installation and take the value of any tax breaks or renewable energy credits for which the customer would ordinarily be eligible. Some companies concentrate on financing and use local contractors for sales and installation, while others do everything themselves.
Through such arrangements, industry executives say, customers can lower their power bills, escape the uncertainty of fluctuating energy costs, and avoid the complex bureaucracy of federal and local credits, rebates, grants and tax breaks.
However, the approach does not work everywhere. Thus far, installation companies have been most active in states where the price of electricity from the utility is high and there are robust incentives, like California, Hawaii and much of the Northeast.
And the transactions are not without risks for both sides. If the systems do not produce the promised electricity, the agreements often require the companies to reimburse customers for what they have to buy from their utility instead. Customers are committed to a long-term contract, raising complications if they sell the house or want to get out of the deal.
Another concern is the trade case, brought by a group of manufacturers who say they cannot compete against Chinese companies able to cut their prices below their costs because of unfair subsidies from their government. The Chinese companies aim to monopolize the market and then raise prices, American manufacturers say.
“The game is simply rigged, plain and on its face,” said Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld Industries America, which originally filed the trade complaint and makes panels in Oregon.
The Commerce Department has already imposed modest tariffs on Chinese-made silicon cells based on a preliminary finding of improper subsidies. On May 17, the department is scheduled to announce its determination of whether the Chinese companies engaged in dumping, or selling products below fair value, which could lead to steeper duties.
Those on the installation side of the business say that cheap imports benefit consumers, and they have urged the government not to penalize the Chinese manufacturers.
For now, those cheap panels are helping to keep business brisk for installers large and small across the country.
“We have our suppliers calling and dropping their prices on a daily basis to move inventory. That works in our favor,” said Heshy Katz, president of Green Power Developers, an installer in New Jersey. “We can offer our clients an installation at 30, 40 percent less than two years ago.”
Roof Diagnostics hired almost 50 new employees in March and April, said Kelcy Pegler Jr., who started the solar division at his father’s New Jersey-based company about four years ago and has expanded to Massachusetts and New York.
“We turned a roofing company that did solar into a solar company that does roofing in support of solar,” he said. “We’re really a solar company now.”
There are more coming!
An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer took their stations, behind tables covered in red gingham. Screwdrivers and sewing machines stood at the ready. Coffee, tea and cookies circulated. Hilij Held, a neighbor, wheeled in a zebra-striped suitcase and extracted a well-used iron. “It doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “No steam.”
Ms. Held had come to the right place. At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.
Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.
“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.
“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”
Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.
“Sustainability discussions are often about ideals, about what could be,” Ms. Postma said. “After a certain number of workshops on how to grow your own mushrooms, people get tired. This is very hands on, very concrete. It’s about doing something together, in the here and now.”
While the Netherlands puts less than 3 percent of its municipal waste into landfills, there is still room for improvement, according to Joop Atsma, the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment.
“The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,” Mr. Atsma wrote in an e-mail.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Han van Kasteren, a professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology who works on waste issues. “The social effect alone is important. When you get people together to do something for the environment, you raise consciousness. And repairing a vacuum cleaner is a good feeling.”
That was certainly true for the woman who brought her 40-year-old vacuum, bought when she was a newlywed, to a Tuesday night Repair Cafe. “I am very glad, very glad,” she said as John Zuidema, 70, sawed off the vacuum’s broken nozzle. “My husband died, and there are all these little things around the house that he used to fix.”
To some, the project’s social benefits are as appealing as its ecological mission. “What’s interesting for us is that it creates new places for people to meet, not just live next to each other like strangers,” said Nina Tellegen, the director of the DOEN Foundation, which provided the Repair Cafe with a grant of more than $260,000 as part of its “social cohesion” program, initiated in the wake of the political murders of Pim Fortuyn, a politician, in 2002, and Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker, in 2004. “That it’s linked to sustainability makes it even more interesting.”
Ms. Tellegen added that older people in particular find a niche at the Repair Cafe.
“They have skills that have been lost,” she said. “We used to have a lot of people who worked with their hands, but our whole society has developed into something service-based.”
Evelien H. Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, agreed. “It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Tonkens, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism.
“It’s definitely not a business model,” Ms. Postma said. She added that because the Repair Cafe caters to people who find it too expensive to have their items fixed, it should not compete with existing repair shops.
The Repair Cafe Foundation provides interested groups with information to help get them started, including lists of tools, tips for raising money and marketing materials. Ms. Postma has received inquiries from France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Africa and Australia.
Tijn Noordenbos, a 62-year-old artist in Delft, started a Repair Cafe there four months ago.
“I like to repair things,” he said, noting that the repair shops of his younger days had all but vanished. “Now, if something breaks, you take it back to the store and they say: ‘We’ll send it to the factory and it costs you 100 euros just to check out the problem. It’s better if you buy a new one.’ ”
William McDonough, an architect, said, “What happened with planned obsolescence is that it became mindless — just throw it away and don’t think about it.” His “cradle to cradle” design philosophy, which posits that things should be built so that they can be taken apart and the raw materials reused (though not necessarily repaired ad nauseam), also inspired Ms. Postma.
“The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them,” Mr. McDonough said.
Take, for example, Sigrid Deters’s black H&M miniskirt with a hole in it.
“This cost 5 or 10 euros,” about $6.50 to $13, she said, adding that she had not mended it herself because she was too clumsy. “It’s a piece of nothing, you could throw it out and buy a new one. But if it were repaired, I would wear it.”
Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”
Theo van den Akker, an accountant by day, had taken on the case of the nonsteaming iron. Wearing a T-shirt that read “Mr. Repair Café,” Mr. van den Akker removed the plastic casing, exposing a nest of multicolored wires.
As he did, Ms. Held and Ms. van der Rhee discussed the traditional Surinamese head scarves that Ms. Held, who was born in Suriname, makes for a living.
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.
An article on race and NYC schools
IN seventh-grade English class, sun leaked in through the windows. Horns bleated outside. The assignment was for the arrayed students to identify a turning point in their lives. Was it positive or negative? They hunched over and wrote fervidly.
Floriande Augustin, a first-year teacher at the school, invited students to share their choices. Hands waved for attention. One girl said it was when she got a cat, though she was unsure why. Another selected a car crash. A third brought up the time when her cousin got shot and “it was positive because he felt his life was crazy and he went to college so he couldn’t get shot anymore.”
The lesson detoured into Martin Luther King Jr. and his turning points. Ms. Augustin listed things like how his father took him shopping for shoes and they were made to wait in the back. How a bus driver told him to relinquish his seat to a white passenger and stand in the rear. How he wasn’t allowed to play with his white friends once he started school, because he went to a black school and his white friends went to a white school.
The students scribbled notes. Unmentioned was a ticklish incongruity that hung glaringly obvious in the air. This classroom at Explore Charter School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was full of black students in a school almost entirely full of black students. As Ms. Augustin, who is also black, later reflected, “There was something about, ‘Huh, here we are talking about that and look at us — we’re all the same.’ ”
In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school system looms as one of the most segregated. While the city’s public-school population looks diverse — 40.3 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14.9 percent white and 13.7 percent Asian — many of its schools are nothing of the sort.
About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic. Explore Charter is one of them: of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian. There is a good deal of cultural diversity, with students, for instance, of Haitian, Guyanese and Nigerian heritage. But not of class. Nearly 80 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunch, a mark of poverty. The school’s makeup is in line with charter schools nationally, which are over all less integrated than traditional public schools.
At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.
The school’s enrollment is even more racially lopsided than its catchment area. Students are chosen by lottery, with preference given to District 17, its community school district, which encompasses neighborhoods like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Crown Heights and Farragut. Census data for District 17 put the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade population at 75 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 1 percent Asian. But the white students go elsewhere — many to yeshivas or other private schools.
Tim Thomas, a fund-raiser who is white and lives in Flatbush, writes a blog called The Q at Parkside, about the neighborhood. He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”
Decades of academic studies point to the corroding effects of segregation on students, especially minorities, both in diminished academic performance and in the failure to equip them for the interracial world that awaits them.
“The preponderance of evidence shows that attending schools that are diverse has positive effects on children throughout the grades, and it grows over time,” said Roslyn Mickelson, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has reviewed hundreds of studies of integrated schooling. “To put it another way, the problems of segregation are accentuated over time,” she said.
Even if a segregated school provides a solid education, studies suggest, students are at a disadvantage. “What is a good education?” Dr. Mickelson said. “That you scored well on a test?”
One way race presents itself at Explore is in the makeup of the teaching staff. It is 61 percent white and 35 percent black, a sensitive subject among many students and parents who would prefer more black teachers. Most of the administration and central staff members — including the school’s founder, the current principal, the upper-school’s academic head and the lower-school’s academic head, as well as the high school counselor and social worker — are white.
As Ms. Augustin said: “When I came here and started to talk about myself, the students were shocked that I was here. I started to wonder, did they really have role models?”
AFTER school one Tuesday, 10 students assembled in a classroom to talk about the school and race. The school paid for snacks: Doritos and Oreo cookies, Coke and 7Up.
What did they think of the absence of racial diversity?
“It doesn’t really prepare us for the real world,” said Tori Williams, an eighth grader. “You see one race, and you’re going to be accustomed to one race.”
Jahmir Duran-Abreu, another eight grader, said: “It seems it’s black kids and white teachers. Like one time we were talking and I said I like listening to Eminem and my teacher said this was ghetto. She was white. I was pretty upset. I was wondering why she would say something like that. She apologized, but it sticks with me.”
Jahmir, one of Explore’s few Hispanic students, is its first student to get into Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s premier schools. He was also admitted to Dalton, an elite private school, where he intends to go. He wants someday to become an actor.
Shakeare Cobham, in sixth grade, offered a different view: “It’s more comfortable to be with people of your own race than to be with a lot of different races.”
Tori came back: “I disagree. It doesn’t prepare us.”
Yata Pierre, in eighth grade, said, “It doesn’t really matter as long as your teachers are good teachers.”
Trevon Roberts-Walker, a sixth grader, responded, “When we are in high school and college, it’s not going to be all one race.”
Jahmir: “Yeah, in my high school there will be predominantly white kids, and I think this school will be so much better if it were more diverse.”
Kenny Wright, in eighth grade, piped in, “You could have more discussion instead of all the same thoughts.”
Ashira Mayers, in seventh grade, said: “We’d like to hear from other races. How do they feel? What’s happening with them?”
Later on, Ashira elaborated: “We will sometimes talk about why don’t we have any white kids? We wonder what their schools are like. We see them on TV, with the soccer fields and the biology labs and all that cool stuff. Sometimes I feel I have to work harder because I don’t have all that they have. A lot of us think that way.”
EXPLORE’S founder, Morty Ballen, 42, grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, where his father ran several delis. A product of Teach for America, he taught English in a high school in Baton Rouge, La., that went from being all white to half-black. The white teachers would tell racist jokes in the faculty lounge, he said. He taught at an all-black school in South Africa started by a white woman, then at a largely black-and-Hispanic middle school on the Lower East Side. The experiences soaked in.
“I’m very cognizant of my whiteness, and that I have power,” he said. “I need to incorporate this reality in my leadership.”
He is also gay and knows about feeling different in school. “The only people who were like me were two kids who went to drugs,” he said. “One died in high school, and the other died recently.”
Mr. Ballen founded Explore in 2002, resolute that a public school could deliver a good education to disadvantaged students. He now leads a Brooklyn charter network. (His fourth school is scheduled to open in September.) The school began in Downtown Brooklyn. In 2004, it relocated to a former bakery factory in Flatbush, where most classrooms were windowless. In August, the Education Department moved it to 655 Parkside Avenue, squeezing it into the fourth floor and portions of the third in a building occupied by Middle School 2 and Public School K141, a special-education school.
The shared building is relatively new and in good shape, but the library is half the size of a classroom, the space so tight that a few thousand books must be kept in storage. The cafeteria, auditorium, gym and playground are shared. Instead of a computer lab, the school has a rolling computer cart of laptops, used mostly for math classes. There is no playground equipment for the younger grades. There are a limited number of musical instruments, so the school has no band, or much in the way of after-school athletics. There are no accelerated classes for high-performing students.
Explore students wear uniforms and have a longer school day and year than the students in the other schools in the building, schools with which they have a difficult relationship. A great deal of teaching is done to the state tests, the all-important metric by which schools are largely judged. In the hallway this spring, before the tests, a calendar counted down the days remaining until the next round.
Explore’s academic performance has been inconsistent. Last year, the school got its charter renewed for another five years, and this year, for the first time, three students, including Jahmir, got into specialized high schools. Yet, on Explore’s progress report for the 2010-11 school year, the Education Department gave it a C (after a B the previous year). In student progress, it rated a D.
“We weren’t doing right by our students,” Mr. Ballen said.
In response, a new literacy curriculum was introduced and greater emphasis was put on applauding academic achievement. School walls are emblazoned with motivational signs: “Getting the knowledge to go to college”; “When we graduate ... we are going to be doctors.” Teachers are encouraged to refer to students as “scholars.”
Convinced that student unruliness was impeding learning, the school installed a rigid discipline system. Infractions — for transgressions like calling out without permission, frowning after being given a demerit, being off task — lead to detention for upper-school students. On some days, 50 students land in detention, a quarter of the upper school.
Positive behavior does bring rewards, like making the Respect Corps, which allows a student to wear an honorary T-shirt. Winning an attendance contest can lead to treats for the class or the freedom to wear jeans.
Still, some students have taken to referring to Explore as “the prison school.”
OUT of uniform and barefoot, Amiyah Young was getting her books in order for homework. She was at home, two blocks from school, in an apartment she shares with her grandparents, mother and 2-year-old brother. She is in sixth grade, willowy, with watchful eyes, a dexterous thinker, one of the school’s top students. She hopes to go to a university like Princeton and become a veterinarian, because she has noticed lots of people own animals.
She blithely showed her snug room, a converted dining nook containing her bed, her books, her stuffed animals, her cluster of snow globes. She said that some of her friends slept with their mothers or siblings, or on the couch.
Her mother, Shonette Kingston, 36, calm with an outreaching smile, works as an operating-room technician and attends nursing school. She separated from Amiyah’s father when the girl was born. He is unemployed, and lives elsewhere in Brooklyn, but remains involved in her life.
“It’s a bit weird,” Amiyah said of the school’s racial composition. “All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”
Would it be better if it were integrated?
“I think they would stop calling me white girl if there were white kids,” she said. “Because my skin is a little lighter and I can’t dance, they call me that. Some of them can’t dance, either.”
What else?
“I could talk the way I talk.”
Other students speak street slang that she repudiates: “They will say to me, ‘You are so white.’ I tell them, I have two black parents. Do I look white?”
She had been having trouble making friends. This year, her mother noticed a speech change. “She’s slacking off more to fit in,” Ms. Kingston said. “She’s saying: ‘I been there.’ ‘I done that.’ ”
Amiyah confirmed this: “I speak a bit more freelance with my friends. Not full sentences. I don’t use big words. They hate it when I do that.”
She said she had become more popular.
Other students also relate the use of parlance linked to skin color. Shakeare Cobham, one of Amiyah’s friends, said: “If you’re darker, they’ll call them burnt. Light-skinned ones get called white.”
Zierra Page, who is in eighth grade, said: “The lighter-skinned girls think they’re prettier. They’ll say: ‘She’s mad dark. Look at me, I’m much prettier.’ ”
Amiyah’s parents are bothered by the abundance of white teachers. Her mother said: “What do they know of our lives? They may be good teachers, but what do they know? You’re coming from Milwaukee. You went to Harvard. Her dad complains about this all the time — what can they bring to these African-American kids? I’m trying to keep an open mind. I’m happy with the education.”
Amiyah said, “The white teachers can’t relate as much to us no matter how hard they try — and they really try.”
To extract her from the synthetic isolation of her environment, Amiyah’s parents have enrolled her in programs with more racial diversity like an acting class in Manhattan.
She is curious about better-off white children. “I’d like to see how they would react in the classroom when we have dance parties,” she said. “I’d like to see how they would react to a birthday party. And to being around so many of us. I’d like to see what they would think of some of the girls in our school who have big hair and those big earrings.”
Anything else?
She mulled that a moment, and said, “I wonder if it’s fun.”
EXPLORE’S administration neither encourages nor discourages discussion of race. Rarely is it openly examined.
A diversity task force was patched together over a year ago to look into things like how to bridge the divide among staff and students and their parents, and what the makeup of the staff should be. The group is preparing some recommendations.
Race, and its attendant baggage, of course, is a tricky subject. Teachers are of different minds about what to do with it.
Marc Engel, a former investment banker turned librarian and media coordinator at Explore, is 53 and white. He frets about power differentials and how to transcend race, how to steer the students’ inner compass. “I worry so much about their role models,” he said. “The rap stars. The fashion models. The basketball players.”
He has his way of trying to fit in. “I call every kid brother and sister,” he said. “I say, hey, brother; hey, sister. One kid once asked me, ‘Are you my uncle?’ ”
OTHER staff members also wonder about the isolation of the students. Adunni Clarke, 34, who is black and is the lead intervention teacher who helps students and teachers who need extra support, said: “I don’t know that our kids get their placement in the world. I don’t know that they realize that they’re competing against all these other cultures.”
Talking about race “could be a Pandora’s box to some extent,” said Corey Gray, 27, who is white and in his first year at Explore as an eighth-grade language-arts teacher. “Is there a proper effective way to bring it in? There probably is. Do I know the way? No, I don’t.”
Many of the teachers are young, from different backgrounds, and there is steady turnover — from 25 percent to 35 percent in each of the past three years, a persistent issue at charter and high-poverty schools.
Tracy Rebe, the principal, is leaving this year. Her replacement, the fourth in the school’s short history, will be the first black principal, though not by design.
Early in the year, Mauricia Gardiner, 30, who teaches fifth-grade math and is of mixed race, was listening as students read a story about a black teenager who tried to rob a woman. Instead of reporting him, the woman took him home and tried to set him straight. The woman’s race wasn’t mentioned.
Ms. Gardiner asked the class what race they imagined the woman to be. They said black, that no white woman would do that. Why? she asked.
“They would be scared of us,” a student said.
“It’s frustrating,” Ms. Gardiner said. “We don’t have a forum to address this. You can get all the education in the world. But you have to function in the world.”
Darren Nielsen, 25, white, from Salt Lake City, is in his second year teaching, assigned to third grade. Last year, when he taught fourth grade, a student got miffed at him and said, “Oh, this white guy.” He later spoke to the student about singling out someone in a negative way because of his or her race. He overheard students call one another “light-skinned crackers” and “dark-skinned crackers.”
“We had discussions about that being inappropriate,” Mr. Nielsen said. “I even said:I’m the lightest-skinned one of all. What does that make me?”
The discussion was quick. “I probably should have done more,” he said. “It was hard on me as a first-year teacher and not knowing what to do.”
He added: “I realize most of these kids are going to go to segregated schools until college. I wonder, am I preparing these kids for what goes on in college?”
Karen Hicks, 41, a former businesswoman who is now in her first year teaching fifth-grade math and science and is black, used to have a son in the school. “I would have put him in an integrated school if I had that option,” she said.
Ms. Hicks recalled her first conference as a parent, with a white teacher, now gone: “The teacher said, ‘Oh, you’re so involved.’ It felt patronizing. That should have been the expectation.”
IF anyone can relate to the students, it is James McDonald. Mr. McDonald, 41, black, the beloved gym teacher, has been with Explore since it opened. He grew up on the Lower East Side, where his father ran a liquor store and left home when Mr. McDonald was 9. He went to predominantly black and Latino schools, and says he didn’t learn what he needed to learn.
In high school, he showed a college application essay to a scholarship committee member, who told him, “If you want to go to college, you better learn how to spell it.” He had written “colledge.” He realized the holes in his education. “It deflated me,” he said.
He thinks Explore students are getting a much better education than he did. Still, he is concerned.
“Outside the school the kids are being reminded of what their race is,” he said. “When they come to school, it’s as if they are asked to ignore who they are.”
“I don’t see that a lot of them have aspirations to do great things,” he added. “Some of them say, yeah, I want to be a doctor. But some, you ask them and they don’t have an answer. I’d like to know how many actually believe they can do whatever they can.”
THE sixth-grade social studies students swept into Alexis Rubin’s classroom. She slapped them five, bid them good afternoon. To settle them down, Ms. Rubin said, “Students are earning demerits in one ... two ...”
She handed out a test on Colonial Williamsburg. She said, “Every scholar in this room will get a sheet of loose-leaf paper for your short response.”
Of Explore’s teachers, Ms. Rubin, 31, is perhaps the keenest about openly addressing race. She is in her third year at the school, is white and grew up on the Upper West Side.
Outside school, she is the co-chairperson of Border Crossers, an 11-year-old organization troubled by New York’s segregated system that instructs elementary-school teachers how to talk about race in the classrooms.
As Jaime-Jin Lewis, the organization’s executive director, puts it: “You don’t want kids learning about sex on the playground. You don’t want them to learn about race and class and power on the playground.”
Ms. Rubin does Border Crossers exercises with her students like MeMaps, in which both students and teachers list characteristics about themselves, then create a “diversity flower,” with petals listing each participant’s unique traits.
During Ms. Rubin’s first year at Explore, a parent called her up, screaming that she ignored her son and called only on the white students. Ms. Rubin pointed out that there actually weren’t any white students to call on.
She said schools needed to “unpack” the issue of race and dismantle stereotypes.
“The beginning is naming it,” she said.
A GAUZY night in early spring, and the PTA meeting in the auditorium drew about three dozen parents. Details were given about picture day, about students needing to show up for preparation for the state tests, about neighborhood ne’er-do-wells who tried to rob some students, MetroCards and hats their targets.
Lakisha Adams, 35, who has three children in the school, spoke brightly of a Harlem mentoring program: “It teaches about how to shake someone’s hand, how to walk without your pants dragging down. This is all black. We put our kids in a lot of programs with kids that don’t look like us. Our kids don’t relate to Great Neck.”
Parents say they like Explore over all and the education it offers. To many, that is enough.
Sheryl Davis, 57, the PTA president, grew up in Brooklyn, and when she was in sixth grade, was bused out of her mostly black East New York school to a “lily-white school.”
“I do remember the hate from the white students,” she said. The next year, she was back in her former school.
“As I got older, I didn’t really see that I gained from that experience,” she said.
“I don’t know that segregation is this horrible thing,” Ms. Adams said. “The problem with segregation is the assumption that black is bad and white is good. Black can be great. That’s what I instill my kids with.”
Would she prefer an integrated school? “I can’t say that I would.”
Families often disagree among themselves. Calandra Maijeh, 38, and her husband, Ife Maijeh, 43, were at the school one evening with their four children, all Explore students.
“Color for me is not an issue,” Ms. Maijeh said. “As long as the learning is up to par.”
Mr. Maijeh said: “My thoughts are very different from my wife. I agree that everybody deserves an education. But I want white and black to be together as one.”
Jean McCauley, 47, is a single mother with two sons by different fathers, both gone from her life. When her older son, now 26, began school, his father had a friend in TriBeCa, and they used his address to get him into Public School 234, a well-regarded, largely white school. “I feel so grateful for my son being in that environment,” she said. “Expectations were so high. That school had everything. It was a world apart.”
He graduated from college and works at a real estate agency.
For her younger son, Brandon Worrell, she didn’t have that option. He is in sixth grade at Explore. She considers it a good school, but fears he doesn’t learn racial tolerance. “At Explore he can’t compare to anything,” she said. “He won’t know how to communicate with other races. He won’t know there is a difference. I think color will always be the first thing he sees.”
She added, “I speak to Brandon about race. But he doesn’t get it. It’s abstract.”
A WEEK wound up. Education was occurring. In kindergarten, they were reading “Sheep Take a Hike,” while in first grade, students wrote about a small moment that happened to them. A girl wrote: “This morning my mom pulled out my tooth. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
In sixth-grade math, they were reviewing order of operations, and in fifth-grade science they were learning about chyme. In third grade, they were writing a response to: How does Jimmy feel about raising goats? Use at least two details in your answer.
A student was told: “You have the right to be mad. You don’t have the right to kick things.”
Mr. Engel, teaching library, went around the room with the first graders and had them fill in the blank of “America is...”
The answers shot back: “America is ... my mommy.”
“Pie.”
“Whipped cream.”
“Burger King”
“Our life.”
One on a pretty awesome 11 year old rock climber
With a concentrated squint, Ashima Shiraishi silently sized up her first rock of the day, a menacing slab of jagged beige boulder 20 feet high, scuffed by white chalk left behind from bigger, older, more experienced climbers.
A black crash pad as thick as a mattress was placed on the ground, and without a rope or harness for protection, Ashima shrugged off her purple jacket, hoisted herself onto the boulder and began to scramble up, her calf muscles bulging gently as she grabbed one nearly invisible ledge of rock after another. With a final stretch, she reached the top, her glossy black ponytail disappearing first, then one limb at a time, until she was out of sight.
A tiny voice floated over the top of the boulder. “How do you get down?” she said.
Ashima had just begun a two-week climbing expedition this spring at Hueco Tanks, a state park that is a mecca for bouldering enthusiasts, 860 acres of rock masses surrounded by endless desert and sky 30 miles northeast of El Paso.
Three days after she arrived, she stunned the bouldering world by climbing Crown of Aragorn, an exceedingly difficult route that requires climbers to contort their bodies and hang practically upside down by their fingers as they navigate a rock that juts out from the ground at a 45-degree angle.
On the scale of V0 to V16 that governs bouldering, Crown of Aragorn is a V13, a level that only a few female climbers had reached.
None were 10 years old, as she was.
Ashima, a petite girl with pale skin, a toothy smile and a thick fringe of bangs cut in a perfect line across her forehead, is not only the best climber her age in the United States, or maybe anywhere, but her accomplishments have already placed her among the elite in the sport.
In 2008, when she was only 7, she began sending problems — bouldering lingo for ascending routes — that some adult climbers could not handle.
On a trip to Hueco in 2010, she climbed a V10 called Power of Silence. The next year, she ascended a V11/12 called Chablanke.
At the American Bouldering Series Youth National Championship in Colorado Springs in March, she easily came in first place, all 4 feet 5 inches and 63 pounds of her.
Before finishing fifth grade, Ashima, who recently turned 11, is redefining what physical tools are required to be an elite climber and showing how a child can hold her own against professional climbers who are adults.
This summer, she will accompany a group of American climbers for an expedition in South Africa, where she will be the only child climber in the bunch.
“She’s this adorable little girl who climbs hard and cries when she doesn’t send,” said Andrew Tower, the editor in chief of Urban Climber magazine. “Her climbing I.Q. is so high, you show her how to do something and she soaks it up really quickly. She understands innately how to move.”
Unlikely Beginnings
It did not take a pro to see that there was something unusual going on at the time Ashima started climbing in 2007, when she was 6.
Her parents, Tsuya and Hisatoshi Shiraishi, had immigrated from Japan in 1978 and settled in a loft in Chelsea. When Ashima, their only child, was 2, they began taking her to Central Park in search of amusement.
One afternoon when Ashima was in kindergarten, they wandered over to Rat Rock, a boulder 15 feet high and 40 feet wide at the south end of the park that is a favorite spot for amateur climbers.
Ashima joined the other climbers and began to scurry up the rock without help, so focused on her climbing that she begged to stay at Rat Rock through the dinner hour. Finally, when it became so dark that Ashima could not see the rock anymore, they went home.
The Shiraishis were mystified. “We didn’t even know that climbing was a sport,” her father, Hisatoshi Shiraishi, said later.
But he knew that his little girl was good.
The Shiraishis went to Rat Rock almost daily, visits that stretched through the summer and into the fall. Ashima kept improving, climbing higher and faster, often attracting a crowd.
By November, it was becoming too cold to climb outside, and the Shiraishis started to worry. What were they going to do with her all winter?
Some bystanders in the park encouraged Hisatoshi Shiraishi, known as Poppo, to take Ashima to a proper climbing gym.
“They said, ‘You’re special,’ ” Ashima recalled, her voice trailing off with a shade of embarrassment. “They told me that I should be climbing at a gym, all the time.”
Climbing tends to attract outdoors types from Western states like Colorado, Montana and California. But every once in a while, “someone pops out of some crazy part of the U.S. and shows us all that it doesn’t much matter where you live,” Tower said, adding that the 19-year-old Sasha DiGiulian, one of the best female climbers in the world, is from the Washington suburbs.
Poppo had never heard of climbing gyms, and none of Ashima’s classmates were into climbing. But curious about the sport and happy to indulge Ashima, he took her to the Manhattan Plaza Health Club on the West Side.
“If it wasn’t for Rat Rock, I wouldn’t have found climbing,” Ashima said, smiling.
Soon, they fell into a rhythm: Ashima would climb nearly every day after school, with Poppo as her coach.
He did not know about rock climbing, but he knew how to move. He had been trained as a dancer, studying Butoh, a form developed in Japan a half-century ago that is influenced by German Expressionism. In New York, he performed in a group called Poppo and the Go-Go Boys, whose “strangely beautiful” routines sometimes ended with dances on and around toilet bowls, a finale that was “more than a prank,” an admiring review in The New York Times said in 1993.
In those days, Poppo the modern dancer and choreographer wore his hair in a triple Mohawk. Now he has toned it down a bit, but on a recent Saturday afternoon at the gym in New Rochelle, N.Y., where Ashima takes a private weekly lesson and participates in the occasional climbing competition, Poppo stood out among the suburban parents in khakis and J. Crew sweaters.
His hair, dyed canary yellow, was buzzed short on the sides and spiked on top. He wore designer eyeglasses and a light gray T-shirt decorated with neat rows of Japanese lettering. (They read, “Are you stupid?”)
Poppo, who has given up Butoh but still moves with the lithe ease of a dancer, watched Ashima intensely as she moved steadily up the wall.
When Ashima climbs, he said, he feels he is climbing with her.
“With dance, there is space all around you,” he said, spreading his arms wide and fluttering his fingers in a circle. “I teach her to think about the space around her when she is climbing.”
Child’s Advantage
Modern bouldering is not much older than Ashima. It reached widespread recognition only in the 1990s as a discipline of rock climbing, one that requires participants to climb without ropes or harnesses, on rocks that generally do not reach higher than 15 or 20 feet.
The sport favors the small rocks over the big ones, so it lacks the drama and death-defying heights of climbing mountains like Everest and K2. But its fans are drawn to bouldering for its spare quality, powerful movements and the simplicity of being unburdened and unaided by heavy equipment.
Very little gear is used, beyond a pair of light climbing shoes, a pouch of white chalk to keep the hands dry and a thick mattress, known as a crash pad, that lies beneath the climber.
During local competitions, a point value is assigned to each boulder problem based on how difficult it is. Athletes climb in isolation, without any verbal help from the ground.
According to the Outdoor Industry Association, 3.65 million people participated in sport, indoor and boulder climbing in 2011.
And as climbing has gained popularity, more children have tried it. One of the top children in the sport, a frequent competitor of Ashima’s, is Brooke Raboutou, the daughter of the former climbing champions Robyn Erbesfield-Raboutou and Didier Raboutou.
Physically, children and teenagers may even have some advantages over adults: their small hands and feet allow them to use holds that adults cannot. Some experts have suggested that they bounce back more quickly from falls and injuries than adults do.
Ashima has not escaped injuries. Her knees are marked with scrapes and scabs. On her forehead is a faint yellow bruise, the size of a quarter, sustained during a climb at her gym in Brooklyn.
“I was trying to do a really big move and I hit my head,” she said.
Getting hurt does not seem to bother her.
“I don’t think about it,” she said. “I know how to fall.”
But the mental requirements of climbing are too much for many children to handle.
Up close, bouldering is slow, even ponderous, a sport that allows for long stretches of hanging out, talking with fellow climbers, sitting around and contemplating holds and pinches. A group of climbers might stay at one chunk of rock for hours, staring at it and plotting the smartest way up.
None of that seems to bore Ashima.
“When she’s climbing, she’s not a child,” Poppo said. “Her mentality is like a professional climber.” Obe Carrion, her private coach, calls it “the stone face” that she wears during competitions.
Kynan Waggoner, the director of operations for USA Climbing, the national governing body for the sport of competition climbing, said Ashima competed as if she were five years older than she is, mentally and physically. The children who excel at climbing, he added, tend to have an ability to concentrate that is beyond their years.
“The best young climbers climb like shrunken adults — they don’t move like children,” Waggoner said. “Their coordination is like a fully formed adult. Their balance is better; their agility is better. They just look like little men or little women. Everything is precise; everything is calculated. That’s how Ashima climbs.”
Not everyone in the bouldering universe is convinced of Ashima’s precociousness. On the Web, her climbs have been questioned by anonymous commenters who have suggested — unfairly, according to the evidence — that she has cut corners.
Doubters have said Ashima could not possibly have climbed what she did, but other climbers have come to her defense.
“These anonymous trolls may have to eat their words,” a blog post on dpmclimbing.com read last year, noting that two days into a trip to Hueco in 2011, Ashima tackled two more difficult boulder problems, with plenty of witnesses around.
Commute to Climbing
Climbing is pretty much the only thing that holds Ashima’s interest for long. Television, movies and computers are not a big part of her day, partly because the Waldorf school she attends has a philosophy that includes a general distaste for technology.
She collects handmade Japanese stickers, which she keeps in a scrapbook, and her favorite subjects are gym and woodworking, where she learned to make a cutting board and a salad spoon and fork.
And though she is as smiley and goofy as the next fifth grader, Ashima shuns the typical pink-laden world of many of her schoolgirl friends. Carrion, 35, likes to tease her that her big reward for all this climbing is a trip to Disney World to check out the princesses, a suggestion that makes her wrinkle her nose in disgust.
“She’s never been a girlie girl,” said her aunt Kay Horikawa, who attends her competitions faithfully and watches her practice. “She’s never had a Barbie.”
What Ashima does have is a steely focus that is unusual for someone her age.
Competitions have been part of her climbing repertory since she was 7, and for the last three years, she has won the national youth bouldering championships, the biggest contest in the sport.
She insists on climbing nearly every day, in a rigorous schedule that takes her directly from school, the Rudolf Steiner school on the Upper East Side, to the gym in Brooklyn where she trains, Brooklyn Boulders.
From Monday through Friday, she and Poppo take a crosstown bus to the West Side, then a D train to Brooklyn Boulders in Gowanus, where she practices from 4 to 7:30 p.m. Another hour of travel, and they are back home in Chelsea for dinner, usually something Japanese like ramen noodles, and homework. (Wednesday afternoons are reserved for lessons at a Japanese school, where she is drilled in language and culture.)
On Saturdays, Ashima often goes back to Brooklyn Boulders, and on Sundays she rides Metro-North with Poppo to New Rochelle for her lesson with Carrion.
During a recent competition there in traditional climbing, which she mixes in with her training in bouldering, she scaled a wall almost 45 feet high with astonishing speed, causing other parents to glance away from their own children and watch Ashima.
“Beautiful climb!” one mother shouted from the ground as Ashima reached the top.
Taking a break afterward, she flopped down on a squishy blue mat next to two climbers, 18-year-old girls with muscular shoulders and biceps, who greeted her by name. Her peers among fellow 11-year-olds are few. “I hang out with older kids a lot,” Ashima said, stretching her legs in front of her.
Bouldering Vacation
Indoor climbing is a necessity during much of the year in the chilly Northeast. But Ashima longs to be outside climbing on real rock, a more unstructured approach that allows climbers to navigate rock by identifying holds that occur naturally, rather than their artificial replicas bolted to an indoor climbing wall.
While some children her age might beg their parents to take them to a beach or an amusement park for spring break, Ashima asked her parents if she could fly to El Paso with Carrion, a former pro climber, for a two-week climbing expedition in Hueco.
They arrived for the trip together, along with her aunt, Horikawa, a music engineer whose flexible schedule allows her to travel with Ashima.
Hueco is most definitely a place that was designed for grown-ups. Many out-of-town climbers stay at the Hueco Rock Ranch, an inn and campground with a grungy hippie vibe where the best rooms go for $60 a night.
Climbing routes in the park have names that seem to have been dreamed up by macho 20-something men: So Damn Insane, Dirty Martini on the Rocks, Girls of Juarez.
Gray foxes, bobcats and roadrunners roam the Chihuahuan Desert, which is a sunny paradise one moment and a swirl of choking dust the next.
But the bouldering in this part of the country is magnificent. Approaching the entrance of the park in a packed sport utility vehicle, Ashima was squirming with excitement.
“This is my favorite place to climb, the best place to climb,” she said. “I just can’t wait to get out there.”
Even outside El Paso, 2,000 miles from New York, Ashima is a celebrity.
On the trails, a 40-something man walked by with his son, who was about Ashima’s age, glanced at her. The two doubled back.
“Introduce yourself to her,” the father whispered to his son, who nervously approached, said hello and then ducked away in shyness.
After doing a few warm-up climbs, Ashima, Carrion and the group headed over to Crown of Aragorn, the V13 that Ashima was determined to tackle on this trip.
After she made a few failed attempts, and some clumsy falls off the boulder, frustration set in.
A dust storm had kicked up, sending sand in her eyes, mouth and ears. She walked over to a mat. Sitting on the ground eating string cheese and sipping a drink, she waited for a break in the wind. Carrion crouched down to give her a pep talk. “You don’t want to be a one-sided climber,” he said. “You’re not weak, you’re strong as hell.”
A few minutes later, she was back on the boulder but fell off again. Still, she refused to call it a day.
Her aunt whispered from the sidelines. “She doesn’t like to quit,” she said.
Three hours after she approached Crown of Aragorn, Ashima finally gave up, but Carrion sensed his pupil would be back. “She’ll send it,” he said.
Two days later, she did, earning immediate accolades from pro climbers two or three times her age.
“The day she did that, I just wrote on Facebook, ‘Ashima is my hero,’ ” said Angie Payne, 27, the first female pro to climb a V13, two years ago, the same level of difficulty that Ashima has just achieved.
“She’s pushing standards in the adult world,” Payne said. “She’s right at the edge of what adults have climbed and she’s on track to take it to a completely different level, assuming she still loves it in 10 years. I really hope she does because it would be really cool to see what she can do.”
Ashima says she has no doubt about that. After high school, she wants to be a pro climber. She already has a running start.
And weeks after sending Crown of Aragorn, Ashima said she had surprised even herself.
“It felt so good,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do it. Next year, I want to do something even harder.”
Solar Installers Offer Deals, Gaining Converts
Jay Nuzzi, a New Jersey state trooper, had put off installing solar panels on his home here for years, deterred by the $70,000 it could cost. Then on a trip to Home Depot, he stumbled across a booth for Roof Diagnostics, which offered him a solar system at a price he couldn’t refuse: free.
Mr. Nuzzi had to sign a 20-year contract to buy electricity generated by the roof panels, which he would not own. But the rates were well below what he was paying to the local utility. “It’s no cost to the homeowner — how do you turn it down?” Mr. Nuzzi said on a recent overcast morning as a crew attached 41 shiny black modules to his roof. “It was a no-brainer.”
Similar deals are being struck with tens of thousands of homeowners and businesses across the country. Installers, often working through big-box chains like Home Depot or Lowe’s, are taking advantage of hefty tax breaks, creative financing techniques and a glut of cheap, Chinese-made panels to make solar power accessible to the mass market for the first time. The number of residential and commercial installations more than doubled over the last two years to 213,957, according to Greentech Media, a research firm.
Major players in the installation business, like SolarCity, Sunrun and Sungevity, are thriving even as the other side of the industry — solar module makers — has been squeezed to the breaking point by fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers. In a case to be decided later this month, a coalition of solar manufacturers has asked the United States government to impose steep duties on the imports, arguing that the Chinese companies are violating international trade rules.
“You hear a lot of the gloom and doom about the industry and, you know, ‘The manufacturers are losing jobs, they’re shutting down,’ but if you look at where the actual money is in these systems and where the jobs are, it’s really in the installation,” said Lynn Jurich, Sunrun’s president.
Big corporations like Google, U.S. Bancorp, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch see the potential for steady profits in rooftop solar projects and have been supplying the capital to help cover the upfront costs, which typically run $30,000 or more for a single-family home. The investors say they believe the returns, generally 7 to 13 percent, are relatively safe because the solar providers generally sign up only homeowners and businesses with solid credit. In addition, installers say that people tend to pay their electric bills even when facing other financial problems.
“We have customers that are foreclosed,” said Lyndon Rive, chief executive of SolarCity, one of the largest installers. “They’re still paying their electric bill so they still pay us.”
The company has raised more than $1.4 billion to finance its projects and is so confident in its future that it is planning an initial public offering of its stock. The company has declined to comment on the stock offering.
Industry executives even predict that solar leases could one day be bundled and sold as securities like mortgages and other loans.
Some analysts caution that despite all the activity, the sector still faces hurdles, like the high costs of bringing in new customers and getting financing. “It’s not clear to me that anyone yet has cracked the code of scaling the business massively,” said Dickon Pinner, co-author of a recent McKinsey report on the industry.
Solar customers can finance their systems in a variety of ways. Businesses often purchase them outright so that they can reap the savings and take advantage of tax incentives and depreciation.
But homeowners are increasingly choosing to avoid the upfront costs. In California, the country’s largest market, more than 70 percent of residential customers putting in solar this year have opted to sign a lease or power purchase agreement with someone else owning the systems, according to PV Solar Report.
The structure of the deals varies by company and state, but the overall approach is generally the same: Customers agree to pay a fixed monthly charge or rate for all the solar power produced, and the companies that finance the systems pay for the installation and take the value of any tax breaks or renewable energy credits for which the customer would ordinarily be eligible. Some companies concentrate on financing and use local contractors for sales and installation, while others do everything themselves.
Through such arrangements, industry executives say, customers can lower their power bills, escape the uncertainty of fluctuating energy costs, and avoid the complex bureaucracy of federal and local credits, rebates, grants and tax breaks.
However, the approach does not work everywhere. Thus far, installation companies have been most active in states where the price of electricity from the utility is high and there are robust incentives, like California, Hawaii and much of the Northeast.
And the transactions are not without risks for both sides. If the systems do not produce the promised electricity, the agreements often require the companies to reimburse customers for what they have to buy from their utility instead. Customers are committed to a long-term contract, raising complications if they sell the house or want to get out of the deal.
Another concern is the trade case, brought by a group of manufacturers who say they cannot compete against Chinese companies able to cut their prices below their costs because of unfair subsidies from their government. The Chinese companies aim to monopolize the market and then raise prices, American manufacturers say.
“The game is simply rigged, plain and on its face,” said Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld Industries America, which originally filed the trade complaint and makes panels in Oregon.
The Commerce Department has already imposed modest tariffs on Chinese-made silicon cells based on a preliminary finding of improper subsidies. On May 17, the department is scheduled to announce its determination of whether the Chinese companies engaged in dumping, or selling products below fair value, which could lead to steeper duties.
Those on the installation side of the business say that cheap imports benefit consumers, and they have urged the government not to penalize the Chinese manufacturers.
For now, those cheap panels are helping to keep business brisk for installers large and small across the country.
“We have our suppliers calling and dropping their prices on a daily basis to move inventory. That works in our favor,” said Heshy Katz, president of Green Power Developers, an installer in New Jersey. “We can offer our clients an installation at 30, 40 percent less than two years ago.”
Roof Diagnostics hired almost 50 new employees in March and April, said Kelcy Pegler Jr., who started the solar division at his father’s New Jersey-based company about four years ago and has expanded to Massachusetts and New York.
“We turned a roofing company that did solar into a solar company that does roofing in support of solar,” he said. “We’re really a solar company now.”
There are more coming!
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Date: 2012-05-13 08:37 pm (UTC)I think we got spoiled living with an engineer all those years. He had a fixit shop, in fact he had two or three, and they all ended up in the toilet, mostly because of the high cost of parts. When it costs more to fix it than it does to buy a new one
made by slave labour overseaseverybody's going to buy a new one.This has been a rant.