On Superman, Race To Nowhere, and Other Stuff

Dear Stuffers - or Stuffed if you happen to be an ATR - and Stiffed too,

As usual, Friday was a busy day at Ed Notes Central. With wife, who retired from her 3 day a week job last February, now joining the weekly Friday MahJong festivities, I am free to roam all over the city.

We had a production meeting at 3pm at a Greek restaurant on W. 4th and 6th Ave scheduled to discuss our new film in response to the Waiting for Superman hedge hog extravaganza coming up in 2 weeks, followed by attending the opening of Race To Nowhere, a sort of antidote to the Superman film, though not quite. (See review in the Times.)

First up was a pickup of the new Indypendent "Back to School Issue" (Download the pdf - upper right hand corner: http://www.indypendent.org/) . at their offices on Broadway and Bleecker.

I wasn't driving in on a Friday afternoon so I bought a backpack. Oy! GEM ordered 1500 copies for distribution. That's 15 bundles of 100 each. These suckers are 20 pages each packed full of goodies. The intention was to put them in a shopping cart the Indy people would loan us to wheel across town to 6th Ave. and then wheel back to return. But it only held 6 bundles. My colleague had a brilliant solution: Take a cab. I almost gagged. But it made sense. We were helped down by Liz from Indy who hailed us a cab - young and pretty works well in this town.

So we showed up at Karavas with 700 copies. Another GEM committee meeting was just breaking up and we loaded as many onto the backs of the people who were leaving and divided the rest  amongst those who were staying for the film production meeting. I still have to go back and get 800 more on Monday. If you want some for your schools contact me at normsco@gmail.com. The Indy people will be at the Sept. 22 chapter leader meeting to hand some out.

Well, anyway, the production meeting was full of fun and frolic over some beer and Greek platter food. I will be talking more about the film in upcoming updates and you might even be able to get involved in some of our activities to promote the film (email me offline if interested in a heads up.)

And then it was onto the IFC for Race to Nowhere (lots of good stuff at the web site and check out the trailer), shown in one of the smaller venues but with stadium seating - not a great idea for an older guy like me who just had some beer and Greek food. But the movie kept me awake. The story is about the pressure kids are feeling over their total lives being scheduled and tested. Lots of anti-testing stuff there and anti homework too. Interesting ideas for discussion and totally counter to the ed deform agenda. But for a Debbie Meier admiring teacher who wanted to teach in a progressive open classroom environment but never could, I eat up this stuff. I ruefully remember the day I gave up the idea after being convinced kids had to be driven to succeed. Well, it was my school culture and certainly infests the charter school movement with their "scholars."

As Steve Koss says, check out the Obama daughters school website - Sidwell Friends - or the Chicago U Lab school where they used to go - and see what the Obamas want for their kids but not for all the others that are being pushed by the ed deform agenda.

After the film we got to chat with some of the people involved. A group of Columbia U students were there and we made contact. I gave out Ed Notes cards and one of them said she read the blog. How cool! She said she really liked the satire. I didn't have the heart to tell her that what she thinks is satire is really just ed deformers being ed deformers and BloomKlein being BloomKlein.