This evening I was honored to be broadcast reading my most recent piece on the WBAI Evening News hosted by Linda Perry-Barr. The reading is found in the last seven or so minutes of the show which you can fast forward to but the whole show is well worth listening to.
Hope you enjoy.
It was a big thrill for my daughter.
http://www.wbai.org/articles.php?article=3328
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January 19, 2017 at 7:04 pm
Great essay! Thank you for speaking out against this travesty. And God Bless you for teaching in Harlem. I taught in Bushwick before all the gentrification took place, and I know what you go through. I also saw some great details in the school’s architecture and trimmings that would be considered wasteful today. Usually these wonderful details were covered w/ 20 layers of paint.
Can’t wait to read more.
January 19, 2017 at 7:21 pm
Thank you Steve.
January 18, 2017 at 11:53 pm
Patrick, thanks for your essay and I share your appreciation of the beautiful doorknobs, and the oak doors, panels and cabinets that survive in so many old NYC school buildings. It’s interesting to think of the time when these were installed–my grandmother learned English when she went to NYC public schools, and she attended Girl’s Technical High School, which was housed in what became Washington Irving HS, in 1913. These doorknobs look to me as if they are from around the time she went to school. She loved school, and she often recited favorite poems for us, including poems in the original German by Heine that she had learned in school, which I thought was especially appealing since she was a first generation Jewish German immigrant, and she spoke German at home. Your doorknob calls up all that time for me, when the arts and humanities had a crucial place, even at a vocational school for young women.
Back in the present, I find it ironic, and maddening, that the Democrats are finally calling charters into question–only when Obama has one foot out the door do they find their voice. If only they had challenged his administration’s charter policies with the same fervor they are demonstrating now. And I am surprised that they really do understand a good deal about the problems. Where have they been? Off in some shadowy neoliberal cave, I guess. I think we should welcome them back to the real world, and encourage them to never get caught in that mistake again. even if at some point in the future they manage to regain control of Congress.
January 19, 2017 at 5:14 am
I’m happy you enjoyed the piece, Jane. As for the Dems, they have betrayed working people including educators to the core. I think we need
a third party, even as I know that seems to be somehow impossible in the US. Thank you for you poignant thoughts.
January 19, 2017 at 7:06 pm
It might just be easier for the progressives to take back their own party.
January 19, 2017 at 7:24 pm
Well, we need to do something and we need to do it soon. The reality that a handful of billionaires own more than half of the wealth of the world is unspeakable and unsustainable in every conceivable way. But this you know.