A rant to the guy in the white house around the corner

Yeah, you! With your lawn putting-green perfect in the dead of what should be winter, I'm talking to you!

The water sheets across your sidewalk like you're lobbying for a luxury car commercial, and rolls into the gutter, quite literally re-forming the American River down the street, wasted into the drain.

There's a drought on, guy! Or girl! Obstinacy knows know gender.

If you think I'm talking to you, it's you. If you know who I'm talking about, tell him/her!

To you this may be the last day of 2013 (well, to me too). With its dry passage, though, marks the driest year in California's recorded history. That's saying something. For all of the state's bombastic beginnings, so many things were lost — fortunates, lives, reputations, virginity — but records … records, my friend, were kept.

We're out of water. Ain't any more coming, as far as we can foretell, anyway.

The latest aerial shot shows one more sheet of Bounty®™ would sop up what's left behind Folsom Dam.

Do not — do not! — wash down your driveway with the house, guy/girl around the corner. Learn basic broom skills. Do not wash your car! Let it go awhile.

I beg you.

In fact, this calls for extreme measures from 1976-77, the last severe drought, when we all lived by by the motto: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

Amen.

It just struck me: Jerry Brown was governor then too! He's waiting to declare this drought official, but I don't know why. The second coming of Linda Ronstadt, maybe.

Water districts aren't waiting. Folsom water users must cut back 20 percent, which doesn't seem enough. We're in serious parch. The whole state must reacquaint itself with the fact we're a Mediterranean climate.

Here's news: The geologic record indicates that across the last two millennia California has endured droughts of between 50 and 80 years. And Jerry Brown was governor then too.

Many central and southern California communities forbid new housing developments from planting lawns, encouraging native plants and xeriscaping instead. Time for it to go viral.

We are not Oregon or Washington, for good or ill.

What's worse, this drought is harshing my swimming mellow.

After days of this arrow pierced through my temples (no physician's assistant is gonna tell me it's probably just flu), I shambled down to Lake Natoma, my old haunt, to see swim friends Doug and David have fun in my absence, slicing through the cold dark water. And plenty of it: The water was at its usual level.

Come tomorrow, though, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is set to reduce what little it's letting out of Folsom Lake, which flows immediately into our lovely little Lake Natoma. I'm anxious for the result. Or lack.

Help out an old, slow swimmer. Check your sprinkler system (you look like you've got a lawn guy: Have him do it) and cut back to once a week. You're watering every day: Why? Maybe you're more oblivious than obstinate, and you don't get up early enough to see your shiny sidewalk. Wake up!

Maybe some good will come of this, like statewide xeriscaping. After the double whammy of drought and Proposition 13 in 1976-77, Californians drained their swimming pools and skateboarding took rise, never to fade again.

Just don't tell me what a nice sunny day it is.

Jack Ohman go boom!*

Jack Ohman is good. Like the world needs my opinion.

Even after the Internet made viewing the world's editorial cartoons a mere matter of mouse clicks, I liked to pick up the Portland Oregonian anytime I was in the vicinity, mostly to see Ohman's latest cartoon.

(Cartoons are best read in your lap or at the breakfast table, your nose to the ink, examining the work.)

He has a distinct painterly style and a fierce voice. He knows precisely the power of the editorial cartoon; he knows not to waste his space and your time with the visual equivalent of a Jimmy Fallon topical toss-off.

Ohman joined my neighborhood newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, this year, after his best friend, cartoonist Rex Babin passed away. Ohman said he made the leap to help raise Babin's young son.

Babin had a spare, reductive style, as if he was carving away his cartoons from blocks of wood or linoleum. His voice as well was understated and circumspect, with occasional pointed jabs.

Ohman has brought a wealth of explosive devices to the job.

Last week he lit up the sky with the cartoon above.

In the wake of the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, so horrible and vast and somehow swallowed up in the sensational Boston Marathon bombings, Ohman blamed the explosion on Texas' lax industrial regulations, touted as a benefit to California businesses looking for cheaper operating locales.

Oh, man!

The 'toon went viral, major newspapers reporting that Texas Gov. Rick Perry got mad. Perry told The Bee:

“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans.
 
“Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas, an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”

Other letter writers said they failed to see the humor in Ohman's insensitivity.

Damn right it's insensitive — but not for its own sake. Ohman's job is not comic relief; it's sardonic dyspepsia. Ohman upholds editorial cartoons on the same serious level as editorials and columns, and uses the directness with which the written word can't compete.

The Bee stands by Ohman, who defended his work in a newspaper blog:

… what normal person doesn't mourn those poor people fighting the fire and living by the plant? I certainly do. What makes me angry, and, yes, I am driven by anger, is that it could have been prevented. I guess I could have done a toned-down version of the cartoon; I am not sure what that would have been, but I think many readers' objections just stemmed from the fact that I used the explosion as a metaphor, period. The wound is fresh, the hurt still stings.

Texas hadn't inspected that plant since 2006, Ohman pointed out.

To be fair, having to explain oneself in a blog defeats the purpose of a cartoon, but it's helpful in its expansion. Good cartoonists such as Ohman count on informed readers to know the issues, and then stomp around in the playgrounds of their minds, splashing ink.

A toned-down cartoon wouldn't have been worth publishing, much less drawing.

Ohman also gets a Sunday comic-sized space to satirize California politics, particularly the musings and meanderings of Gov. Jerry Brown and his corgi, Sutter, who comments on the lunacy a la Pat Oliphant's Punk. Ohman has an interloper's view of California, without any cows to hold sacred.

Here's a recent one, with entertaining riffs on art history:

His stuff is well worth visiting.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/ohman/#storylink=cpy

*to borrow from the colorful patois of kids (or at least TV commercials) these days …

Injustice for all

"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education."

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thanks to teachers who carry on. Thanks to families and guardians struggling to teach their children well. Thanks to children who don't give up … and those who won't let them give up.

Class sizes for Kindergarten through third grade now regularly exceed 30 students in California. Gov. Jerry Brown and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson blame the wrecked (and not yet repaired) economy for obliterating the state mandate of 20-student limits in the lower grades.

Teaching children to read — giving them keys to unlock the world — is difficult enough already. Critical thinking lies in critical condition.

"We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Crunching numbers

Maybe I wouldn't have amounted to much of a teacher, after all.

I may not have gone where I intended to go,
but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.*

Maybe this is a bizarro "It's a Wonderful Life" story, wherein George Bailey, granted a chance to see a world without him in it, finds little difference.

Maybe some soothsayer could have talked me out of an expensive four-year rollercoaster ride that dropped me right where I'd started.

I mean, numbers don't lie … ?

Under ideal conditions, I'd be rolling toward the end of my fifth year as a teacher right now, my severalth career.

Hopped up on high stress, I'd be prepping students for the all-important state test (known as STAR in California, for Standardized Testing and Reporting) to which teachers must teach these days, because results mean so much to the future of each school. But I'd accept the stress, just as I had chosen this profession, and its myriad competing expectations.

Right about now, I'd be congratulating myself at the organizational skills I'd amassed in the last five years — and cursing myself for forgetting to photocopy the one worksheet I would need for the morning.

In a few moments I'd be racing to the school, hoping the custodial staff had unlocked the campus so I could be first to the photocopier, praying the machine wouldn't jam mid-job.

Right about now — the Ides of March — I'd receive the letter telling me my services won't be needed for the next school year. It would likely have been the fifth consecutive notice; with receipt of each one, I'd have sweated out the coming months like thousands of other teachers statewide.

Having survived — having had my termination rescinded — like as not I'd been teaching a different grade and at a different school from when I started. Maybe even a different district, where I'd start all over on the seniority ladder. But I'd be lucky and happy for a teaching job. I might have cut my workday to nine or 10 hours, and finally stopped falling asleep on the classroom floor trying to put the next day together and defuse the landmines.

Right about now, I'd dare to entertain a half-thought: I just might get the hang of this teaching thing one day.

These aren't ideal conditions, though, in case you're the last to know. The economy, to use a term economists have employed, sucks. California's economy suffers from its own poison brand of suckage, eating away at the infrastructure to provide for even the most standard needs, especially public education from pre-Kindergarten to graduate school.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is bracing for $400 million in cuts the next school year, eliminating adult education and cutting 11,000 jobs. That's in addition to millions of dollars and thousands of jobs already cut from the budget since bleeding began in full in 2008.

(More than 20,000 California teachers this month have received their pink slips; it's an annual ritual, more widespread in the last three years. Though many will be able to return to teaching, more and more will not. School districts will wait until November — two months after the school year will have begun — whether voters will raise taxes to prevent a $4.8 billion cut to public K-12 education in Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget. Isn't that a fun job, predicting whether or not your school district will have enough money to pay for teachers, staff and resources? Over whose heads will hang the sword?)

Twin Rivers Unified School District in the Sacramento area, where I last worked as a full-time teacher, would be spared cuts under a tax initiative proposed by Gov. Brown for the November ballot. Twin Rivers would get special treatment as a new district, even though it's really four districts swallowed into one and given a new name.

Frustrated by an array of similar initiatives designed to enhance or obfuscate his own proposal, Gov. Brown has been trying to wave off the other initiatives, and just this week agreed to join forces with another initiative, if for nothing else to simplify the ballot.

But maybe all this bleeding is a good thing?

I mean, Del Paso Heights Elementary School, where I last worked, had 19 teachers on staff in 2011, the latest public figures show. Those teachers served 478 students.

In 2008, the year I worked there, Del Paso Heights had 28 teachers, who served … 478 students.

Fewer teachers — nearly a third fewer — the same number of students. I have to conclude that some or all of the classrooms became more populous, that state laws to cap enrollment to 20 students per class from kindergarten through third grade were lifted. I know that the classroom in which I taught was re-fitted the next year to accommodate students with severe disabilities who came from another school, so general education students were consolidated into remaining classrooms.

I may have been one of those 28 teachers in the 2008 figures; I'm not sure. The data released by the California Department of Education, and made available by the news media (in this case The Sacramento Bee) lists staffing by year, rather than school calendar year. So instead of listing 28 teachers in the 2008-09 school year, it lists 28 for 2008. I'm confused, you see.

Five teachers were let go that first year, nine total since then.

The conventional thinking is that a lower student-teacher ratio is best for students; students get more attention, more instruction, more correction, more chances to make mistakes and learn from them. But the STAR results — the results that officially matter — for the same 2008-2011 period suggest the students are doing no worse, and in some instances are doing better with fewer teachers and more crowded classrooms.

(Full disclosure: I'll never be mistaken for a statistician. Glaring poorly thought-out analysis may soon ensue.)

Look at STAR results for the third grade, where I taught, in 2009, the results from the year I taught them (those poor students!) In language arts, only 5 percent were considered advanced, and 18 percent proficient. These are the holy grail levels teachers strive for. A third of third graders tested at the basic level for language arts, 22 percent were "below basic," and 21 percent "far below basic."

Math was far different: A third of the students tested as advanced, 22 percent as proficient, and 18 percent as basic. Seventeen percent finished at "below basic," and 9 percent as "far below basic."

(Why math comes out so much better is a puzzle; maybe numbers are the truly universal language, and since at least six languages were spoken in my classroom, and about a third of the students were learning English as a second language, numbers made more sense to more students; maybe the math lessons of a more experienced colleague enriched we teachers who deployed them in our classes.)

The next year, after five teachers on staff were dismissed, the percentage of third-graders listed as advanced in math dipped to 25 percent, but those labeled proficient ballooned to 41 percent. The percentage for basic students stayed the same, while those for "below basic" and "far below basic" shrunk.

In language arts for 2010 STAR results among third graders, a higher percentage scored in the advance and proficient categories than did the year before — from 5 percent to 17 percent for advanced, and from 18 percent to 29 percent for proficient. The percentages of students scoring basic and below shrank.

By 2011, with four fewer teachers serving the same number of students, STAR scores for third graders moved more into the basic (37 percent compared to 27 percent the year before) and "below basic" levels (25 percent, up from 18 percent the year before). Those "far below basic" held steady at 9 percent.

Math scores held fairly steady, except that a higher percentage of students moved up into the upper three groups. Only 7 percent of third graders tested in 2011 scored "below basic" in math, and only 3 percent "far below basic."

Though I'm not privy to the herculean battle teachers waged to help their students, I don't doubt the remaining teachers and their principal girded up and bonded over the challenge of improving test scores. Their effort, at least in the case third grade, defies conventional thinking. As crowded as the classrooms may have gotten, the teachers found a way for more of the students to grasp the concepts they're supposed to know at that grade.

Results for the other grades show their own vagaries, but nothing to tell me that the loss of nine teachers spelled academic doom for the same number of students.

Getting laid off dismayed and disheartened and discolored me. I had gone back to college (an education in itself, and not just in the classroom) to embark on a new career path, to find I have horrible timing. Since the district did not give me any official credit for time served as a teacher (I was a 0.0), and I was under temporary contract, the teachers' union couldn't do more than bid me, "Good luck with … whatever."

I was lucky to have something else to do to make money. Not so with some of the other students who went to teacher school with me. And since then I have had some teaching opportunities, most recently teaching art to students in special education through a third-party program. I enjoy the challenge, as I had when I was teaching full time. I was committed then to being the best I could be, to figuring out how. I was in it, as they say, to win it.

I was willing then to give up most of what my life had been to that point. Teaching, at least for me, was all or nothing. I would have to give my all to become good at it, and give up freelance drawing, give up swimming regularly, give up the fun of being a tour guide and doing side jobs, give up the lack of a regular schedule, in exchange for good (I thought so, anyway) consistent pay and a career pursuing teaching mastery.

But maybe these are all sweet lemons. Maybe this rocky short-lived teaching career was an elaborate way of demonstrating I was not meant to be a teacher. For all my willingness to become good at teaching, I have to admit I'm not good at it now.

I teach for an hour at a time now, and I look at the second-grade teacher, standing aside for my time, ready to assist, her students wound up from a long day, being second graders, unable to sit quite as still or be quite as quiet as my lessons really need — and me really unable to settle them — their room redolent with their sour playground sweat. And I think: I could not do this all day, day after day, and worry about my shortcomings each summer day until school resumes, and worry about where and whether I'll be when school resumes, to try and do better.

It's hard not to think, based on the numbers I just crunched, that students can get along OK without me for a teacher.

This will not be a post I'll return to for inspiration.

* Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul