conuly

I already mentioned Duck, Duck, Bruce, of course.

Next month I intend to get playground equipment.

Now, the way I do this is as follows: I make a big list of everything I'd buy if I had lots and lots of cash, and then I whittle it down to reflect the fact that, in fact, I have no cash. I do most of my non-essential shopping like this, and it's about the only way I know to do that sort of budget. This sort of sudden death elimination helps me keep my priorities in order. If I *don't* do that I end up with a lot of regret after the fact, wondering if I forgot something.

(Tangent for a second, Ana and I have been playing jacks lately (must rescue my jacks from upstairs first thing in the morning!) I never actually played jacks as a child. I had jacks, certainly, and I played with them and had a vague understanding of how the game went, but I was too uncoordinated (and certainly saw myself as uncoordinated, which was a combination of reality and a self-fulfilling prophecy) to play the game itself so instead I just sorted my jacks by color and spun them around a lot. (And a lot and a lot and a lot. Evangeline came across me absentmindedly twirling a hanger on my finger the other day. "WOW. That's AWEsome. It's AMAZING, Connie! How do you DO that!") Ana's not very good at it lately and, every time she makes a mistake, says "I'll never get it!", with such pitch perfect inflection that I start to wonder if she's repeating something she heard elsewhere. Interesting fact, this backfires if she's in a serious snit, but if she's just a little peeved mimicking her is a great way to get her to be less melodramatic. She's a good little actress, really, and when you copy her and then ask her to do some other face she will often comply so fast she gets whiplash, as well as a bad case of the giggles. BACK ON TOPIC NOW RAR!)

Anyway, playground and gym equipment. I'm told they have nothing.

Now, I asked for help earlier and you all responded admirably, except those of you who didn't respond at all, of course, but you know what I mean. I have a tentative list, but it's very important that I get stuff as high quality as I can afford - it has to survive not just children, but little children. Ye gods!

Firstly, if anybody has any further suggestions, please make them.

Second, my list! Advice on the best, the cheapest, more resources?

( Read more... )

The school yard has a playground on street level, and then down a flight of stairs is the general playspace. It has two basketball hoops. Given that the oldest child in that school is 7, that's a bit WTF?, but there you go. The local teens have taken to sneaking in the yard at night to play basketball. Everybody knows about it and brings the subject up like they're worried, but then say in the same breath that it *must* be all right because they're not littering or being loud. Well, duh, I should hope it's all right! Nobody else is using them! And we're so bereft of sport areas (or playgrounds) in this area it's a travesty. It really is. Silver Lake is nice, but it's a hike up several hills and it's all greenery. I like greenery, but it'd be nice to have something else as well.

What they could really do with that space is set it up properly for handball. The way the school is, built into the hill like everything around us is, the wall around the yard goes up well above an adult's head, and then the backyard above it has a fence around it as well. Plenty of space on that blank concrete wall for a handball court, and if not there then on any of the *other* blank concrete walls. (I'm tempted to go there with some chalk one day and cover it with color, anything other than gray gray gray.)

When I was a kid I read a pretty forgettable book (I read a lot of those) that mentioned tetherball, which was the first I'd ever heard of it. I've never seen it in real life, which is strange. You'd think NYC would be all over this, as it sounds like it doesn't take much in the way of equipment or space to set up. I wonder if that would fly past the PTA and could get set up. Just to have something that the kids could do that's not basketball :) (Well, they'll grow, I guess. But the basketball hoops - and surely we didn't really need two of them for a full game, just one would suffice for pick-up games! - are smack in the middle of everything. Anybody's playing there and the rest of the yard will pretty much be useless to play in.)

About the graduating Stuy class.

I went to Stuy. When I was there, there were a lot of people making bad jokes about how "if anyone ever were to attack, we'd be in the middle of it" and how "if anybody attacked a school, it'd be us". Nobody ever believed it would happen, of course, but a lot of us said it anyway.

Stuy is "just north" of the WTC (one stop north, in fact), but... it's not the closest school. My mother worked a block and a half away from the WTC. Between her and the twin towers were a pair of linked schools. When 9/11 happened, those kids were all evacuated into Staten Island. Some of them saw things falling out of the windows, had stuff hit them.

And afterwards, there was article after article about Stuyvessant, but none about those high schools. They were displaced a lot longer than Stuy was, and, because they're linked schools, being displaced meant that they were each essentially without half of their staff and student body.

I loved Stuy. Even when it made me miserable, I loved that place, I loved the people. It was like home to me, but with more tests. And yet... I had teachers who, if we got an answer wrong in class, would say "What do you think this is, Brooklyn Tech?" (the third-ranked specialized high school at the time. Easier to get into than Stuy, but hardly an easy school). I had other teachers specifically chew us all out for insulting the students at BMCC next door. Many (not all, but many) of the kids there were from fairly well-off families. I had classmates say something about their house in the Hamptons, only to catch themselves and clarify "but not the good part of the Hamptons", which says a lot more about them than just the house part. I had otherwise intelligent classmates try to tell me that their families were almost struggling because only one parent worked - and that parent made over $125,000 a year! That's not rich, but it's far from struggling.

If they want to do an article about the class that entered high school in 2001, that's great. If they want to do an article about the students at schools near to the WTC, that's great. But it doesn't have to always be Stuy. Those kids are already in an environment that breeds a heady sense of privilege and entitlement. It doesn't help that they're always the school getting articles in the paper, or interviewed on NY1, or that the school newspaper has even been published by actual media. It's not fair to the kids at Stuy, and it's not fair to anybody else in the area, either.

( Read more... )

Edit: None of my commentary is in any way meant to imply that Stuy kids are horrible people or anything. In fact, most of the people there are far nicer than other people their age. Plus, it's a place where people make bad jokes about sinusoidal curves, and where it's okay to have a "Buffy Appreciation Society" (not to mention a Pinky and the Brain club), and where people play chess and/or Magic in the halls.

Edit again: I wonder that this article in no way deigned to mention that aside from the large Asian and Russian Jewish immigrant populations, Stuy has (or had, at least, and I doubt this has changed) a surprisingly large Muslim population. Not that large, but more than you'd expect from pure chance, I think. You'd think that might be important...

Edit the third: Coming as Monroe? Not bad. Of course, I remember when Jesus got stuck in the escalators. That was funny. (That was the same year somebody in my drafting class came in dressed up as "white trash" for Halloween.)